Dying Breath

From the journal of Adam White:

First day in the field, first day out of service. Fucker got me in the shoulder and it burns like hell. What else is there to say? 

Alright, they're telling me there's more to say, and I'm supposed to say it. "From the beginning." Whatever that means.

The beginning. 

Well, I was born in Sevenoaks, in Kent. Dosh clogging up the train to London. I spent my time at university pissed up, and graduated a stunning brawler. That was... seventeen months ago. 

What else. I'm a marksman, or near enough. My dear father was an officer of the law and liked the idea that I should be, too. Woe is me. I joined the Royal Army instead and was stationed in Cyprus and then Afghanistan before someone bothered to notice I have a head on my shoulders.

Mr. White goes on for a while, as instructed. I have been repeatedly shocked by the candor with which the soldiers write; they are made aware that their journals are used for psychiatric evaluations (though they are not told their commander will scrutinize every entry). Perhaps Armageddon liberates them to speak their minds. Or perhaps their training has stripped them of all dishonesty, even by way of omission. I would not know. For all my expertise, I have never dropped and given twenty. I have never stared determinedly past caustic drill sergeants  saturating my soul with violence by the pressure of absinthian words. I have never even held a firearm, beyond the plastic pistolas de agua I played with as a child.

All in all I am remarkably unqualified to judge. Nor am I qualified to explain the origins or mechanics of the facilities that house XCOM, whereby we have advanced our war-making. I may deem the logistics worthy of report en el futuro próximo. For now, I will merely note that circumstances in our first mission persuaded me that improving our soldiers' armor was of paramount importance.

Our first mission - yes - called Dying Breath, in bravado, perhaps, or exultant pessimism. General Hitori names the operations; I merely execute them.

White is getting to it now:

A few hasty introductions on the plane, hello and how do you do, not much small talk. I can't decide if it was an honor or a slight to be chosen for first contact - am I promising or expendable? It was clear enough what the others thought. The Aussie had a stern look, ready to chastise the ETs to death. Okindukawhatever's tail was between his legs already. And the girl - Mulder, for the love of God - I'm still not convinced she wasn't assigned to this mission purely for her name - well, American girls always look happier than they are. She winked at me after we landed, when the bay doors opened. I've since seen her without the armor, and fuck me if I don't get the chance to see her in even less before I die. 

Our corner of Beijing looks a hell of a lot like everywhere else.

Anyway I was expecting a little more hide and seek. Instead Kerrick kangaroos his way behind a car and there they are, a pair of them, grey and balloon-headed. I remember my first thought quite clearly: They look soft.

Kerrick, the Aussie, puts on a dour face and lobs a grenade at the Grey that doesn't scurry off. Turns out they look even softer on the inside.

OK scurries around the building while I cover him, while X-Files trips her way into three more ETs. They get a few shots off (I call dibs on the first gun of theirs we capture. Thick red jam - that's what the projectiles remind me of) and one of them does some kind of weird trance thing to one of the others. X-Files takes a hit but manages to stay standing. I'll give her this - she looks ace with a little blood on her. 

I'm against a building - things happen fast: I take a shot through the window (knicked my hand on a piece of glass, but it was worth it; looked damn safe) but the fucker dodges behind a bookcase. There's an explosion behind me - X-Files kicks the trance twins with a grenade - and OK lets fly on number three. Naturally he's too busy cowering to hit. 

Things are a little hazy after that. OK's bungled shot leaves me flanked, and the Grey he shot at decides I'm the bigger threat. I don't think I even felt the shot. Just saw a white light, like the snows over Newcastle. The late February gales. My wound looks more like April sludge. 

I do remember two things: First, X-Files' mad scream - I'd thought she'd been hit, at the time, but it turns out it's only the sight of me, deltoid wide open. ODE, the commander, tells her to hold steady, but she leaps from cover and shreds the bastard that shot me.  

And the second thing - Kerrick's charge, grim and silent, and the sound of his feet on broken glass, and the wretch of his gun as he kills the fucker behind the bookcase. 

Then the white became black, and here I am. At least the bed is comfortable.

Kerrick's corpse is somewhere around here - I saw them wheeling him in earlier. Apparently a sixth Grey had been circling around us the whole time. Got the Aussie in the back. 

They're starting a memorial. How romantic. 

That's not the worst of it. The worst of it, the real injustice, is that they're promoting OK and X-Files. Not me. Oh, no. Apparently they're giving ranks for Most Improved. OK has half a dozen misses and one lucky shot... and Mulder! Who panicked! In the middle of an operation! Who defied explicit orders!

Whatever.

I've been given two weeks' leave for my troubles. I've got company, too. X-Files and her bloody new sniper rifle, which she keeps by her bedside like a loved one.

She does look good with a rifle. And the hospital beds are comfortable...

Maybe I'll make nice. Two weeks... who knows what might happen between two people in two weeks, perched here at the end of the world. 

A Small Red Light

My name is Octavio Domingues Escovedo. I was born in São Paulo, Brazil, on 6 June 1978, in a mass of angry consonants and morphing vowels: the city Itaquaquecetuba, meaning bamboo sharp as knives. I was raised in España (Ama a la Patria, they sing now, in the Marcha Real; a loathsome command: love the motherland; but I remember when the song was wordless, spoke in melodies alone; and it was loathsome then, too) - and then the United States of America, in the cities of Dallas, Texas and Portland, Oregon and Washington, D.C. and various others.

As of 6 June 2015 I have been alive for thirty-seven years, though I am told the last five do not count. They have been claimed by the government of the state of New Mexico as recompense for past injustices.

I live - and have lived, for the last five years - in a small concrete box with a single rectangular light fixture on the ceiling. I have never once seen that light flicker. It buzzes constantly. On days when I am feeling particularly upbeat I can remember what silence felt like. On worse days I imagine climbing my latrine and leaping, Olympian, to strike the glass, Sköll swallowing the sun.

But two lifetimes - sans five years, now - would be a long time to spend in darkness.

Two lifetimes; yes. The first I forfeited for building three small explosives that were detonated in a middle school in Carlsbad, New Mexico. The second I earned for smuggling firearms to what my prosecutors referred to as "agents of despair."

Despair - "carrion comfort," says Gerard Manley Hopkins, the author of my one little book.

My one little book is a collection of poems. It was given to me by General Hitori Kamiya on 17 December 2014, along with nearly $300,000 worth of electronic equipment, for three reasons:

1. I am a great lover of poetry.

2. On 15 December 2014, a series of unknown artifacts collided with the earth's surface in over 40 heavily populated areas and wreaked unprecedented devastation, later determined to be extraterrestrial in origin.

I felt the shockwaves here in my cell, and for a moment I wondered if I was to get my Inferno's due, to fall victim to Dantean poetic justice, dying in an imbroglio of collapsing walls and non sequitur bombast. El octav(i)o circulo de infierno. 

And the third reason? The final justification, the last excuse for offering these gifts to so criminal a man as I?

3. I am the greatest military mind of my generation.

I do not claim this out of ego; I merely repeat what I have been told by those who would know. Those like General Hitori, and those in his worldwide alliance (Ama al Mundo!), his secret brainchild, his "XCOM." Those under my command. With the equipment in my cell, I see and hear everything; I am Big Brother, the eye in the sky, the invisible hand of God. To the soldiers I am Ode, or Commander - a voice, a distorted face on a screen.

At first I refused to participate; my payment, already credited, I am assured, is the redaction of merely one of my two life sentences. My guardian angel, perhaps, breaths a sigh of relief. But if I have a best friend - and I would shudder to think I do not - it must be General Hitori, for he knows me so well. "Think of it as a game," he told me.

I like games. I like winning them.

And I am very, very good at winning.

- - -

You might ask: Why, Octavio (for you and I are friends, I hope), are you telling us this?

Well:

On the back of one of the machines that wires my soul to XCOM is a small red light that blinks on and off at a rate of one switch per two and a half seconds, give or take. Sometimes my screens go black and my speakers quiet, presumably to stop me from overhearing more than necessary (world leaders having lazy tongues), and the technologies that bind me to the outside world become mere lumps of matter. Paperweights. Even during these blackouts, though, that small red light keeps blinking. Rudolph's nose, low-fly warnings, un latido de luz.

Just over an hour ago, the light went out.

It may mean nothing. A glitch. Or perhaps I have been excommunicated at last, relieved of my duties, by virtue of victory or incompetence.

Maybe.

Still - I have pages printed from the diaries of soldiers living and dead, painting a wild and haphazard portrait of our humble dying world. If I have finally lost the game, the Earth deserves a full confession of my actions, and those of the soldiers under my command - because it will be robbed of many of the years I owe; a lifetime is a lifetime, after all, no matter how short.

But let it not be said I am a hopeless man. I leave you with this: hopeful words from my silly little book. A comforting buzz, proof that the invaders have not yet swallowed the sun:

Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;

Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man

In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;

Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.

Ama al Mundo.