I've been thinking (uh-oh, right?)... not about technology, this week, but about war. You know, the fact that it's full of stupidity, tragedy, and the irony people who are hardly any different from each other are trying to kill each other by any means necessary, whether with the highest high tech gadgets, fifty-year-old rifle and explosives technology, or the simple expedient of hitting someone with a sharp or heavy object.
So I'm going to post a story I wrote, inspired by a painting I saw a while back. The painting showed a man silhouetted against a window, in the background, and in the foreground there was a framed photograph.
So here commences ye short fiction.
He was sitting by the window, silhouetted against the grey light that filtered through the rain. He sat very still. I couldn't see his face, but I knew well the blank mask that he wore, whenever he sat there and let his mind wander. His eyes stared as though he was blind; he sees, but his thoughts, at the time, were far away and in the distant past.
I had brought him a cup of coffee, but he had barely touched it, set it on the table beside him, using a sheaf of documents as a coaster. They were reports on a prototype infantry weapon - a new tool in our great fight, I said. A new way for fathers and sons to grind each other into the dust, he said. I kept quiet when he told me that. To doubt the glory of the struggle is disloyal in spirit, but he means no harm, and he is a strong leader of men. Reporting him would do more harm than good.
I had brought him a letter from his sister, and there it was, a corner of brightly colored paper sticking out underneath the weapon files. He hadn't opened it.
Then he turned his head, and moved, blind to my presence at the door, and picked up a small picture in its frame. I knew that well, too. It showed three men and a woman, smiling nervously at the camera - almost children, looking terribly out of place with their fresh and unscarred weapons and body armor, their bulky helmets under their arms. It had been taken hours before their first battle, I knew. I had heard the story many times.
There were names written on the glass:
Simfr. KIA.
Woods.
Chang. KIA.
Olsen. MIA.
He touched the glass, as though he was caressing the faces of the men and the woman who had disappeared, long ago, consumed by the long war. Even his own must seem foreign to him now. His first engagement, his first command, are as distant as the Peliades to him. I know, because he has told me many times. He had huddled with his friends, terrified, before the signal came, and like machines they had climbed out of their trench and slaughtered the enemy, that cold morning so many years ago. They had fought together, been wounded together, mourned together, been victorious together, and then one at a time, they were lost. And he had endured.
He sighed and turned back to the window. I stepped away from the door and went back to my desk. He hated to be seen weeping.
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The when and where of this story is up to you, save that it is in a grim and unpleasant future of ever-expanding war. If you want your children to see it, voting for John McCain would be, at least in spirit, a step toward that end.
(Other diaries in this series include: the sociology of fictional places, steam-powered giant robots, thermal depolymerization, nuclear airplanes, psychic powers, transgenic bacteria that make useful compounds, lightning in a jar, neural interfaces, powered armor, sonic weapons, rapid prototyping, putting Mentos and Diet Coke to good use, life on life support, combining farming and electrical generation, pigeon pilots, cuttlefish behind the wheel, the hafnium bomb, and building a better skunk.)