Future Weapons of War

who piggyback the detonator chip onto a relatively normal chipping procedure—giving a child an identity chip, for example, or the standard parental notification chip that must now be inserted into every newborn— a procedure that’s a law in more than one hundred twenty countries.

Hospitals insist that medical personal are screened. Each chip brought into the building is scanned for foreign technology. Each chip has its own identification number so that it can be traced to its source.

None of the chips found at the thousands of bomb sites since the Paris bombings have had hospital identification. Yet the rumors persist.

Perhaps it is wishful thinking on the part of all involved. How much easier it is to blame a nameless faceless person hidden in the impersonal medical system than a parent who knowingly pays someone to place a bomb inside a child—a bomb that will not go off in days or even weeks, but years later, after that parent spends time feeding, clothing, and raising that child.

Bonding with that child.

Treating her as if she’s normal.

Treating her as if she’s loved.

* * * *

One of the soldiers gives you a ride back to the Green Zone. You lean your head against the back of his modern, hydrogen-powered, air-conditioned behemoth—too big to even call a truck—and close your eyes.

The little girl has shaken you. Sonic stories do that—some interviews do that—and the key is to hold onto your professionalism, to remember what you can prove.

But in that space between wakefulness and sleep, you find yourself thinking that you live your life in three distinct ways: You have your everyday experiences, which are so different from most people’s. How many people travel from war zone to war zone, from danger spot to danger spot, running toward the crisis instead of away from it? Such behavior is now second nature to you. You think of it only at odd moments, like this one, when you should be asleep.

You also live through your articles, your “live” reports, your blogs. People who see/read/hear those things believe they know the real you. They believe they have walked with you into the valley of the shadow of death, and they believe that they, like you, have survived some kind of evil.

Really, however, you live inside your head, in the things you’re afraid to write down, afraid to record, afraid to even feel. You lied when you implied that fear hasn’t been in your life in decades. Fear is in your every movement. But you speak truth when you say you haven’t felt fear.

You haven’t felt anything in a long, long time.

That’s the most important thing they fail to tell you when you sign up for this job. Not that it could kill you or that you might even want it to kill you.

But that you can look at a little girl who has lost everything—her health, her family, her belief that someone once loved her—and you think she does not measure up to the rumor. She isn’t the story that will save you, the news that will make you even more famous than you already are.

She doesn’t even merit a mention in your long piece on suicide squads because she doesn’t change anything. She is, to you, another body—another item—another fact in a lifetime of useless facts.

She is not a child, any more than you are a woman.

She is a weapon, and you are a reporter.

And that’s all you’ll ever be.

DAVID IN THE LION’S DEN Geoffrey A. Landis

Monday 25 March, U.S.A.

David had both of his arms up in a glove box when Jake walked into the lab. He was concentrating on pipetting one drop of a cultured retrovirus into each of the sixteen tissue culture samples that his grad student Asim had carefully prepared and didn’t notice Jake was there until he spoke.

“Have you heard the news yet?” asked Jake. His voice was grim.

“News?” David Kantrowicz sighed. “There’s news? No, haven’t heard it.” He put down the sample, capped it off, and withdrew his arms from the glove box carefully.

He was a tall man, with dark curly hair and wire-rimmed glasses. Only a close friend or exceptionally keen observer would notice the slight hesitation in his step from where he’d stopped a small-caliber bullet long ago. “From your tone, though, I can guess that it’s not good. They made the decision? It’s Saud the younger?”

“It’s him.”

“Damn.” After months of bitter infighting after the death of the king, the council of princes of Saudi Arabia had finally reached agreement. Aboud ibn Abd al-Saud would be king of Saudi Arabia, protector of Mecca and nominal leader of the Moslems. It had come at the worst possible time, when the Arab world was increasingly becoming disenchanted with the lack of any signs of resolution to the peace process. Al-Saud was a fanatic; he had made his pledge that he would not accept compromise with Israel of any sort, no matter how well crafted, or what the cost. And the cost was sure to be high.

No matter who won. “As my grandfather would put it: oy, vey, such tsuris we need like we need holes in the head.”

“Yeah?” Jake said. “Did your grandfather really talk like Woody Allen imitating a Poconos comedian?”

David shrugged. “How should I know? He died when I was a kid. To hear my father speak, he did. So anyway, we’re ready?”

“We’ve talked about it enough. The question is, are you ready?” Jake asked.

“I guess so.” David sighed again. He turned back to his glove box to start putting away his samples. “Although I’d rather not. War is for young fellows, not superannuated postdocs like me. But, last week I called Yosef in Tel Aviv. He said that they were pretty sure it would be Saud, and when it hits the fan he’d welcome having me back with him. I told him that if it comes down to it, I’ll be there.”

“You don’t count as old until you get tenure, kid. I got the tickets. You fly out tonight at seven, arrive in Rome late morning, and get into Tel Aviv about two.”

“So soon? I’d hoped for more time to prepare.”

“Things are moving faster than we’d expected.”

“So be it. How about your part? Are you ready?”

“Yes.” Jake reached into his pocket and look out a finger-sized test tube, the end sealed with a wax plug. A small amount of dirty water was pooled in the bottom. He handed it to David. “We finished last night.”

Dave looked at it skeptically. “Doesn’t look like much, does it? This is enough?”

“Don’t doubt. It’s plenty.”

He looked at it critically. “You know… that’s some real work here. It’s a pity we can’t get something publishable out of this… maybe Nature…”

“Don’t even think about it.”

“I know.” He paused. “I’d better be off, I guess.”

“One more thing.” Jake walked to one of the stainless-steel lab refrigerators and retrieved a sandwich in a Zip-loc bag from behind the rows of sample jars and tissue cultures. The refrigerator was labeled with a large red letters: LABORATORY USE ONLY. DON’T KEEP YOUR LUNCH HERE.

“Here you go. Ham and swiss with bean sprouts. For your trip. Shalom, my friend. And mazel tov?

“Yeah, right.” David looked back at his glove box. He thought about leaving a note for his grad student to clean it up and keep the cultures alive, but realized it wouldn’t do any good. The virus he’d been working with wasn’t dangerous; it had been engineered to infect guinea-pig livers, part of a study tracing enzyme expression. The work would wait. He’d much rather stick here, tracing protein variants through an unexceptional biochemical pathway, than fly across the world to a place where people would be killing each other, but they’d made their plans long ago, and now it was time to see what they could do.