Irontown Blues

Eleven

I understand that, for the very oldest of us, the most important question you can ask them is “Where were you when you first heard of the alien invasion of the Earth?” I knew a few of the First Generation, but none of them well enough to ask them that.

For most of the rest of us, unless you are from Mars or Pluto, the question is “Where were you during the Big Glitch?”

Those words drop like heavy stones into my mind:

We all have our own stories about it, of course, and endless stories about the aftermath, which is still being felt.

Most of the people I’ve met who want to talk about it seem to think that their own personal experience of the Big Glitch would make an excellent article or movie. Once I get them to finally stop talking about it, I know even more certainly that their stories fall into half a dozen general categories, and there is nothing at all remarkable about almost all of them. We are all the stars of own movie, aren’t we? For most people, the story was how scared they were while waiting to find out just how fucked we really were. Of how we tried to contact loved ones in a world suddenly, and largely without precedent, cut off from all forms of communication more sophisticated than shouting, and of how to survive it.

Sorry, folks, we were all terrified. Your story isn’t special.

There are so many compelling stories of heroism that only the most extreme were ever deemed unusual enough to be dramatized. You have probably seen a dozen of them if you are the typical viewer.

I have seen none of them, but I’m not typical.

There are some stories that claim to take us deeper into the inner workings of the Glitch. Some of these stories have been published in one way or another, and a few have actually been dramatized. They mostly concern the people whose job it was to bring the runaway train to a halt without totally wrecking the thing. They tend to be technical, but for those who can follow the technology, they are said to be real page-turners. A few of these stories are even believable, or so I’ve been told. Again, I haven’t read them.

The most popular of these accounts, and an almost totally nontechnical one because she is hardly more cyberliterate than I am, is the story told by Hildy Johnson, the former reporter for the News Nipple newspad. I gather that she claims a special relationship with the Central Computer that predated the Glitch by almost a year.

She believes she is one of the first people to get a hint that something was deeply wrong with the CC.

In her account, she tells of meeting with and becoming a member of the Heinleiners, that group of malcontents out in the Delambre Crater who figured so prominently in the disaster.

Remember how it all got started when the CC decided those rebels were a menace to the orderly society that it had been building for over two centuries?

How the CC secretly raised an army of psychopaths from mysterious military sources on Pluto and Charon, brought them to Luna, and had them train a larger force of irregular soldiers?

How the Heinleiners proved to be a lot harder to subdue than anyone had anticipated? How, in fact, they won the miniwar waged there in the junkyards of Delambre, in the shadow of the great, failed starship, the Robert A. Heinlein?

How they came out of hiding long enough to help restore order out of the chaos, then melted back into their wary isolationism?

Sure you do. It’s one of the great urban legends of our time. Some of it, maybe even most of it, may actually be true.

I don’t swallow it all, though. For one thing, you don’t “join” the Heinleiners. It’s not an organized group, to say the least. You simply choose to live out there if you don’t like a lot of people around you.

For another, she describes technological advances that were sure to revolutionize our way of life. We were supposed to be on our way to the stars by now.

As you may have noticed, we are not. What’s up with that?

Hildy herself admitted to being an unreliable narrator. She warned us that she would be deliberately changing some details of her story, and not just the names to protect the innocent. This was all to help keep the secrets the man she termed “Valentine Michael Smith” felt humanity was not ready for yet. She threw some red herrings into her personal mystery story.

Okay, I’ll admit it, I read her book.

In spite of my resolution to pretend the Big Glitch never existed, never happened, I knew Hildy Johnson’s story was the most thorough and most likely to be true of all the accounts out there.

I knew it because she had almost killed me there.

I really can’t hold a grudge against Hildy Johnson, though.

The fact is, I was trying to kill her.

I really did kill her dog, and I’ll always be ashamed of that. I hope Sherlock never finds out.

In my defense, I hadn’t meant to kill the dog. I hadn’t meant to kill anyone or anything. I had been told these people were a clear and present danger to all I held dear. The rule of law, for one thing.

But once more I’ve shied away from the main thread of my story. It’s just that, if I am ever to talk about Irontown and what goes on there, I first have to deal with the Big Glitch and what I did during it.

Remember I spoke of “irregular soldiers?” I was one of them. And I marched as blindly into hell as generations of soldiers did before me…

In retrospect it’s hard to figure how reasonable it all seemed at the time. I cringe every time I recall how easily I was duped into it all. And yet… it was the CC. It was that friendly voice you had been hearing since childhood. It was almost as if your imaginary friend, Harvey or Hobbes, had suddenly started barking orders like an old drill sergeant.

But I was the poster child for gung ho back then, all eager to set the world on fire, or at least warm it up a little. I envisioned a rapid rise through the ranks until, who knows? Maybe the post of chief of police was within my reach.

All the experts will tell you that if you possibly can, it’s best to avoid the profession or art that your parent was very successful at. But it seems the compulsion is very strong. Even big success in your parent’s field of achievement will have, as an end result, everyone looking at you, and saying, “Oh, right, he’s so-and-so’s child.” Rehab clinics are choked with the children of fame. So are funny farms.

I spent some time in a psychiatric unit, but not for that reason.

The CC definitely knew people, knew what makes them tick. As well he should, since he manufactured a different personality for every one of the millions of inhabitants of Luna. We all felt that we had a deep personal relationship with the CC. That was true, in a sense, as that part of his vast capacity really was focused on you, and you alone. So it was deep, and it was personal, but what it was not and never could be was special. Everyone had their own little corner of the CC’s mind to call their own. It was about as unique as having a belly button.

When he came around recruiting, he knew exactly which levers to pull. I said I was gung ho? You bet, and the thing I most wanted to do was enforce the law.

Most of our laws derive from the premise that someone famously summed up as “Your rights end where my nose begins.” We’re not so much into turning the other cheek, so if you start something, be prepared to see the other party in court.

Anyway, when the CC summoned me to a meeting and designated it as being held under the highest security rating, the only bells I heard were no alarms at all, but more like the bells that ring in fire stations when it is time to get moving with no wasted time. And like a faithful Dalmatian, I climbed aboard the flyer and soared into the air, heading for the smoke.

We met down at the very lowest, bedrock level of the city. It was a place where you expected rats to scuttle, where water was actually dripping from the ceiling before winding its way to a dirty-looking drain in the floor. There were light fixtures overhead, but few of them were working.

The place didn’t smell very good. I’m sure Sherlock could have identified the smells, but I couldn’t, except to say they were musty.

There were faded and peeling posters on some of the walls. They were so old that I had little idea of what they were touting, except it seemed to be some political party I had never heard of. If they had been meeting down there, I would have assumed they were on the fringes, maybe even revolutionaries.

It was at that initial meeting that I and my comrades on the force got our first look at our leaders.

How to describe them? Very few people outside the Heinleiner enclave ever saw one. For many who did see them it was the last thing they ever saw. It was almost that way for me.

There is even debate as to what exactly they were and whether or not they were all the same. They gathered up their wounded and dead — leaving us common grunts to our fate. The survivors took off for the Outer Worlds that spawned them. No one ever found any of them, and no government or company ever admitted any involvement.

The smallest of them were at least seven feet tall, and well over three hundred pounds, none of it fat. There had been gene tampering that was illegal everywhere but Charon and Pluto. Somewhere under all that bulk was the cherry on top: machinery, not unlike some of the wilder creations of fiction writers before anyone had ever constructed a humanoid robot.

Much or all of the bone structure in these cyborgs was made of titanium. The muscles had been augmented with carbon nanofibers, giving the monsters extraordinary strength.

Judging from the metal skull fragments that were found, their brains were on the small side. Not small enough to make them stupid.

They were either all male or neuters. I certainly could not have told you without asking one to drop his pants, and of course these days even that would not have been conclusive.

My take on them is that they were not about reproduction or sexual pleasure. They were about fighting and killing, end of story.

Any one of them could have crushed my head with one hand, just by squeezing it. This went a long way toward making me want to please them if the orders from the CC hadn’t been enough. My fellow conscripts seemed to feel the same way. When one of the cyber-sergeants said hop to it, we all jumped.

We didn’t realize that we were being sold a bill of goods, at least partly because we were already sold. Though Luna was not under attack, it was the concept of law and order that we were swearing allegiance to.

Hurray for law! Let’s hear it for order! We will die, if necessary, to protect those twin beacons of freedom!

Well, theoretically, anyway. We all knew no one was going to die. Who could stand up to us with the Mighty CC behind us?

It was going to be a walk in the park.

One more thing that should have raised alarm bells was the lack of preparation. Our training was what you might call cursory. We set out on three consecutive weekends. We skulked through woods deep in the Bavaria disneyland, shooting at each other, though no Heinleiners lived in the woods. We had guns that shot pellets that stung quite a bit if they hit you. They were called BB guns. One woman had her eye put out. The CC paid for its replacement.

Oh, the fun we had! We pitched tents and roasted marshmallows and danced naked around our bonfires and drank and smoked and fucked ourselves silly. We had a wilderness experience that other folks paid a lot of money for. It was all in aid of group bonding. It was nothing like boot camp in the old movies. I sometimes wonder if having a drill instructor shout that he was going to tear off our heads and shit down our necks would have made any difference to how we fought when we finally went in against the “enemy.” I doubted it.

After those maneuvers and other exercises at least as pointless, we were finally given real guns, hand weapons of a sort that had not been issued for field use in the previous thirty years or so.

I proved I could hit a three-foot target at twenty yards… every once in a while. I got a kick out of shooting the old things. But it was nothing compared to the thrill of handling and firing a portable drilling laser.

Our unit consisted of twenty cops and one sergeant. Most of the cops would be packing handguns and/or rifles. Projectile weapons. But each unit was to also have one laser, not because anyone, even the CC, ever intended to use them on people, but because they might come in handy if we had to burn through walls.

There’s an expression, “cowboy up.” Its original meaning may be lost in time, because it now has nothing to do with herding cattle. These days it means to gird your loins to face a challenge. But it also means to put on macho airs. To swagger, to be cool.

There is just no way to handle a portable drilling laser without feeling like a cowboy. On Earth, it would take at least two people to handle one. Even on Luna you can’t give one to a small person. In our unit we drew lots and I was the winner. Or loser, depending on how you look at it in hindsight.

While I handled it, I was the center of attention. With the delimiter turned off, that fucker would burn a hole through six inches of steel in less than a second. It would also burn holes in rock, which is what I did.

There must be some destructive impulse in the human genes that makes many of us delight in blowing stuff up. Shooting a laser was a lot easier than a gun. You could see where the beam was going. You had a low-power aiming laser to zero in on your target, then you pulled the trigger. And kerblooey! Vaporized! I defy you not to get a kick out of that. My heart leaped every time one of the rocks was turned into a spray of red-hot gravel.

But soon enough we were summoned and told we were going into action. And off we marched, into the maw of the beast.