The Last Good Man

Bitter Philosophies

They’ve lowered one side of their SUV’s split backseat. Shaw is laid out there, wrapped up in an emergency blanket, with a nest of camouflage blankets padding his head against the bounce and vibration of the road. Still breathing. A bag of artificial blood sways from a hook. He’s drifted in and out of sleep since a morphine injection. True watches as his eyes blink open again.

She sits cross-legged beside him, crammed into the cargo area, her shoulder against the back hatch. Rohan shares the cramped space. He’s sitting with his long legs bent, an elbow over the seatback, turned so that he can watch the road ahead. Felice and Miles are squeezed into the half-seat. Lincoln is up front, with Khalid driving.

They are rushing to make a rendezvous arranged by Lincoln’s State Department contact. A bulk transport helicopter has been hired to ferry them out of the country. They should be aboard in another twenty minutes.

Shaw’s eyes turn to look for her. He seems uncertain. True isn’t sure how well he can see. His corneas look a little cloudy. Scarring from the gasoline, maybe. She leans closer, touches his bearded cheek. “Almost there.”

He surprises her with a faint smile. The scar on his upper lip—a souvenir of Nungsan—is bloodless and pale. He fainted when they lifted him from the wet ground under the anti-surveillance canopy to move him into the car, and he’s said nothing since. But he speaks now, a whisper barely audible over the road noise: “Eight years late.”

Raw truth. It’ll all be over soon and they both know it.

Before they moved him, Khalid had bandaged his hand and replaced the outer layers of the dressing on his shoulder. Shaw had spoken through that process, revisiting his bitter philosophies in a manic episode discharged in an angry, panting whisper—his last chance to get it all out there: “We’re done. Done. Our time’s over. The human race is getting phased out and we deserve it. Diego saw it coming. I laughed. I laughed at him when he talked about robots taking over our job. But he was right. Mechs make better soldiers. Easy to print, easy to train, ruthless. And no one gives a fuck if they’re shot down, blown apart, burned up. So what are we for, True? You ask Lincoln that, okay? What’s left? What’s left when you’re a species running on an outdated operating system? What’s left to do but rage, rage.”

Eight years squandered on rage. What a fucking waste. But he gave some comfort to Diego in those last hours, and even knowing what he’s done since, it’s a consolation for her to do the same for him. It eases the bitter ache. She braces herself against the hatch door and leans over until her lips are close to his ear. “Thank you for taking care of him. I know you would have saved him if you could.”

She sits up again, swaying with the motion of the truck. He watches her in silence for another minute, maybe two. Then his eyes drift, until a final stillness comes over them.

What’s left? Lincoln asks himself. He’s got the air conditioning running full blast, countering the heat of too many bodies in the truck, and the stink of sweat and of blood and the faint lingering reek of gasoline… though that last might be his imagination.

He did what he could to secure the battle site before he left.

With Rohan and Miles helping, he searched the house and inspected the two SUVs. All the weapons they found—assault rifles, handguns, grenades—they stacked in one vehicle, setting it on fire before they left. The electronics—tablets, laptops, phones, cameras—he confiscated. Tamara might find something useful in them.

He left the second SUV to the two surviving Al-Furat soldiers, along with the task of dealing with their dead comrades. Maybe they’ve left the bodies to rot, but Lincoln was hoping they would take them somewhere and bury them, out of sight. What he was certain about was that they would not risk arrest by going to any police or other authority to report what had happened.

The starburst copter that had dueled with the sentinel was a loss. Tamara lost contact with it, concluding that the two battling machines likely collided, or if there was a victor, it probably ran out of battery power before it could return. Their second copter and Roach are back in their shipping containers, secured to the roof racks along with the rest of the team’s equipment. There’s no room anymore for the gear inside the packed SUV.

He turns to check on the team. Miles gazes out the window, lost in thought. Next to him, Felice is nodding. Rohan, who’s leaning on the seatback, notices his gaze. He turns to nudge True, who looks up, red-rimmed eyes bright and fierce and bitter. When she sees Lincoln, her lips part as if she’s about to speak, but she changes her mind and instead she draws her fingers across her throat. And it hits him, a sharp blow, more painful than he thought it’d be. He nods brusquely and turns back to face the road ahead.

What’s left?

Shaw said a lot when Khalid and True were working on him, getting him ready to move. Lincoln heard most of it, words that might be easy to dismiss as the ravings of a dying man, except that more and more lately, Lincoln has been thinking the same things.

When autonomous fighters command the air space, self-driving tanks control the ground, and agile robotic vehicles scout and secure cramped urban areas, what need will there be for soldiers on the front lines?

Times change. War grows ever more impersonal. Anyone who dares to look can see it coming. Combat duty will be limited to a control room half a world away from the front line. That’s where Lincoln is supposed to be now.

His prosthetic hand runs through the tapping sequence. He regards it, admiring its functionality but resenting the limitations it puts on him. And he is conscious of the blindside deficit in his vision that makes him see Khalid as an indistinct figure behind the wheel, cast in shades of gray.

He is not qualified for field duty. He knows this time he’s going home for good. That shouldn’t feel like a tragedy—God knows he’s experienced his share of battles—but it does anyway. What’s left? He’s acutely conscious of a sense of loss, of dislocation, not just for himself, but for a profession that reaches back to the days of the American Revolution. Soldiers, always ready to step up when they were needed, ready to serve, to trade their lives for the defense of the country.

It’ll be robots instead in the years to come, because, like Shaw said, who gives a fuck if they’re shot down, blown apart, or burned up? Better to lose machines than sons and daughters, right?

Yes!

Lincoln has been shot, blown apart, and burned. He doesn’t ever need to experience any of those things again, doesn’t need to see others suffer them.

He asks himself again: What’s left?

This time he has an answer. Claire is at home. She might still be willing to try to patch their broken marriage. Unlike his father, he might get to see his children grow up. He’s grateful for that chance.

Even so, it provokes him to think that his profession will become the exclusive province of programmers, mechanics, engineers, and the autonomous systems they design.

Autonomous warfare will not be bloodless. War by machine proxy is still war, with the sacrifice pushed out of sight, the burden unloaded on distant people. The repercussions, inevitable.

It’s not hard for him to imagine an armed Arkinson—or something worse—engaging above an American city.

The tragedy of the world is that for all the clever minds and brave hearts that have ever been, no one has figured out yet how to forge a lasting peace. Lincoln is confident that armed conflict will not be going away. If he keeps Requisite Operations on the cutting edge of battlefield technology, he could be in business for a long, long time.

Alex sits on the wide ground-level deck behind the house, boots propped up on a stool, gazing at the trees across the lawn, watching their shapes slowly emerge from the grip of an early-morning fog. He hasn’t slept all night. Yesterday he went home from work early after messing up on a call. He let them know he wouldn’t be back—not until he knew if she was alive, if she was coming home, if he could ever forgive her.

He’s read her last message a hundred times. I’m with Lincoln now, and this is almost over.

The deck heater kicks on, humming quietly as it struggles against the cold. His phone is on the table beside him. Jameson called thirty minutes ago to say the team had recovered Shaw Walker and were on their way to a pickup point, but since then the phone has been maddeningly silent.

When it finally does ring in its standard-issue corporate chime, he doesn’t reach for it right away. He lets the tune play for several seconds before he leans over to see who’s calling. If it’s Jameson, it’s probably another update. If it’s Chris… well, that would be bad news.

The call is from her.

He picks up. Waits.

“Hey,” she says after a few seconds. Her voice sad, hoarse. He thinks she’s been crying.

“You all right?” he asks gruffly.

“I’m not hurt.”

“Jameson said you’re bringing Shaw home.”

“Yeah.”

“Was it worth it, True?”

She takes a few seconds. When she does answer, she speaks slowly, trying to find the right words. “You told me that Nungsan was like a black hole that we’ll always be circling around. You were right. It’ll always be there. But we don’t have to look at it all the time. I don’t have to. Not anymore. Alex, are you going to be there when I get home?”

He thinks about this, thinks about his options, and tells her the truth: “Where the hell else would I be?”

“Okay, then. I’m on my way.”