homes. Don’t forget that.”
Mai swallows and nods.
But it doesn’t stop her from feeling personally responsible in some small way.
Mai catches a ride back to the core camp center on a Ploughshares truck, exhausted and nerves frayed. A Chinese engineer sitting on the back of the flatbed is curious.
“I didn’t think you could get tired in those suits,” he says to her in careful English.
“That is a misconception,” Mai tells him. “Your body is still moving, all day. Muscles still do much of the work. They are just amplified.”
“What about getting shot at?” he asks. He’s staring at the scars in her outer armor.
“It becomes normal,” Mai says, offering a salty fatalism she does not yet feel. She’s looking down at the helmet in her hands. There’s a dimple right in the forehead, and a coating of copper and lead that has dripped onto the faceplate.
That dimple suggests at least
Mai shakes that away and looks around. The fleet of recycling trucks are covered in advertising logos. “Does everything have advertising built into it?” she asks the engineer, looking to change the subject.
He shrugs. “Why not? If all goes well, what will the refugees see every day? Logos for Ford and Nissan, McDonald’s and Dannon, Apple and Samsung. What better advertisement than being the ones who brought them peace and prosperity?”
And if it doesn’t work, Mai figures, these people will never see the logos again. The sponsors lose some trucks, cash, and some shipments of last year’s shoes and tracksuits.
These companies will write these off as charitable donations and somehow, come out ahead.
They always do. Tails you lose, heads I win.
The minds from which this evolved, despite their ramrod-organized military world, are the children of nonviolent protestors and emergent, technologically-enabled regime overthrow. They are the nieces and nephews of two generations of UN sorties, which are derided by the major powers, but have a history of quiet, incremental improvements and painfully slow progress.
They are the process of gamified solutions, market testing, and the Western fear of bad publicity.
What did it mean that this was war? At boot camp Mai practiced for bloody hand-to-hand combat, and learned group movement. Thinking as part of a squad. Reaching the overall goals of a mission.
Armies want fast-thinking, creative problem solvers able to deploy violence for the nation they serve.
Now Mai is wondering how she ended up being a robotic creature, following the exact letter of the law to not so much as harm a hair on her enemy.
Even when they are slaughtering the innocent.
“It’s not the mission,” Nguyen explained at training in Australia. “It violates the mandate of the mission. Fail it, and we are just another invading force.”
“It doesn’t seem… right,” someone objected.
“Right has a new meaning when wearing this armor. It changes the equation. You are a supreme force unto yourself.”
“With technological superiority like this, we couldn’t possibly lose,” Mai added.
“Depends on what you mean by lose. Westerners certainly learned the limits of simple technological superiority when your grandfather was just a young man.” Nguyen stared her down, and Mai had wondered if Nguyen had accessed those files about Mai’s family background. “A nation is a fiction of consent, and North Korea has built a mythology and controlled fiction unsurpassed in the world, aided by extreme isolation. People starve and thank their rulers for a handful of rice, or thank them for permission to visit a Western Red Cross station. In order to reshape the fiction, we need to reshape the narrative that the world sees, that North Koreans see, and that we engage. Force is one narrative. But we are not limited to it.”
Captain Nguyen walked around, looking at her recruits.
“These methods are not effective enough when implemented by oily-faced teenagers, the unemployed, and the uneducated. What they need are the iron-hard wills and command structure of a military mindset. The kind that understands that one might have to run into a hail of gunfire and die to protect the mother country. The kind that can follow orders intelligently. No nation has ever seen an invasion force like this.”
One of the Western advisors was there. He chipped in. “It took the army to develop one hundred percent non-fossil fuel mobility while civilians dicked around with political initiatives, wasted subsidies and lots of arguing. We just did it.
And then Mai and her fellow recruits learned how to get shot at, attacked, and beaten, without once displaying or reacting with aggression.
She wrestles with a fleck of shame, having failed that training to a small degree on the firebase. The fear in that soldier’s eyes lingers in her mind the rest of the way back.
The hardest part of Mai’s day is hearing the distant, occasional pop of a handgun from somewhere in the forests. Her amped up acoustics in the full-on armor pick it up every time. Software calibrates, offers up information on where the shot came from, and shows it in her heads-up display.
Every single time a gunshot goes off, she has to stare at the damn red marker telling her where it has happened.
Each pop makes her flinch with the knowledge that it is the execution of a desperate, captured civilian.
“Someone should put eyes on that,” she tells Captain Nguyen in a staff meeting. “We could use it to turn opinion against them.”
“Opinion is already against them. Sympathetic members of the military are uploading video of the executions. Our job is to protect the camp. Stay put. Patrol the walls, Sergeant. Do your job.”
Eventually Mai transfers to the south wall and dampens the acoustics with help from a technician.
But even the threat of death doesn’t stop the trickle of refugees. They risk everything to get through the North Korean emplacements, and make a desperate run to the safety of the camp. The camp constantly grows.
After another one of her long patrols, Mai runs into Duc near the mess hall on the north wall.
“How are you?” she asks quietly. He’s been a bit withdrawn ever since they first found the open graves.
“I’ve now been shot one hundred and thirty-seven times,” he tells her, a note of wonder in his voice. “The armor works. But I think… it’s…”
Duc looks away, then back at her. He opens his mouth to continue, and it seems as if he’s screaming. A demonic sound fills the air, rising in pitch, higher and higher until Mai can barely even comprehend it.
When Duc shuts his mouth, the sound doesn’t stop.
They’re out of the mess hall and through the doors in an instant, yanking helmets on and looking around, and then finally: up.
A shimmering, hard red slash of light cuts the sky above the camp in half. It stabs upward into the sky, and originates from somewhere to the south, where intel thinks the North Korean Army has established a new firebase.
“What is it?” Duc asks.
Information scrolls across their helmets. It’s a laser. High energy, tightly focused. Most of the red slash she’s “seeing” is actually interpolation from her suit’s sensors.
Mai follows the path of the beam, and sees that it intersects neatly with the icon that represents the dirigible floating thirty kilometers overhead.
“They’re going after our power,” Duc says.
The icon wavers and blinks out.
