Chapter 1 of “The Wolf of Urgency”

Copyright © J. E. Konrad All rights reserved.

Matthew Heraclius dreamt of his mother. 

As with many strong dreams, this one was founded in early memories.  They say children form memories differently from adults. They’re saved in different parts of the brain, in deeper storage, away from memories of later life, with more powerful smells, more powerful colors.  More powerful fears.

There was one small, glass-sharp shard of a happy memory: an apartment, a holiday tree, his mother haloed as if by sunlight, leaning over him to pick him up.  Remembered her scent, like irises, the fold of her headscarf as she fed him sticky sweets, ‘for Eid,’ she said.  In the background, hovering, the protean inchoate shape of his father.

Matt, seeing him, said ‘Ummi’, putting his arms around her. 

After that there was never happiness again.  All washed away in a collage of warped images: sharp words between his parents about things he didn’t understand, tall wordless men at the door, suitcases, travel tickets on lifecards, the overhead announcer at a transmatter hub.  Crowds of impossibly numerous, loud, differently clad people towering over him as her warm hand held his.  Then, they stood still and left Veii.

A sharp blast of heat.  ‘We’re on Qom now, honey,’ she said.  ‘New friends.’   Trying to sound cheerful.  But Qom was all sand and rock and furnace, and it was no Veii and there were no friends.  Tears of unhappiness and fear are supposed to scald grooves into your cheeks, but on Qom, they got stolen away by the hot, dry air in seconds.   Qom scorned tears.  The cries of the muezzin were different, the accents strange, the arguments on the streets frightening.  He saw a man beaten, laying bloodied on the pavement, as people stepped over him.  She held his hand tight and they walked by.  Why had she insisted they come here?  What was that preacher’s hold on her?

Dreamt again: the first distant boom of a vehicular bomb on the far side of the city, how it shook everything, and sirens as the Milites aircraft flew there and the Cultics tried to collect the body parts and find the mouths to put the coins in for the Ferryman, until the mob drove them away.  Kindergarten, with its mean, suspicious children, soon closed. 

Then, days and days in their shabby new apartment, living, once the power went out, by candlelight on rice and beans, him hating this horrible place, until that last night, when the shelling was a few blocks away, and his parents had their most violent argument. 

And suddenly they were quiet, whatever difference between them, settled.  The sight of his mother with a rifle, pulled out from under their bed, slung over her shoulder, and his father’s big hands, swapping a battery hidden in the cookie jar onto a battered pulse rifle.  Where had such terrible instruments come from?  His father picked him up like he was nothing, light as a pillow, and was warm and held him close for minute.  ‘When we leave, you get under that sofa.  We’ll find you.’  Then, the look on his ummi’s face as she paused at the door, and the last – last ever – words she said to him:

“Trÿk in ìn.”

‘Back in a while.’ 

From his father, one last grunt.

He dreamt again the long wait of days and nights blurred together, scrounging the last of the canned food from the cupboard by stacking the kitchen chairs, as the booms grew in intensity and the building shook and plaster cracked into dust.  He dreamt again the stench of the commode that couldn’t be watered any more, and the smell of dead bodies somewhere nearby, and the rats running through the broken rooms.  He dreamt again a farrago of baffling images, painful fears, ever-present hunger, and then, after an interminable time alone, the building cracking wide open and daylight pouring in, and a giant man in combat armor striding through that avalanche of light like some god, grasping his little hand. 

“What d’we do with this?” a jarhead’s voice asks.  “Looks like he’s starving.”

“Guess we’ll have to keep him.”

According to the Red, or War, Commandments, Milites were supposed to kill only armed combatants: civilians, including kids, were off limits.  Once a civvy was behind the lines, he or she was supposed to get evac’d to a refugee center for necessary medical treatment, processing, resettlement outside the combat zone.  A few, if identified as leaders, might be put on trial.  A small fraction of those, in turn, might be slated for execution, but a new order had come down from the Empress: all death sentences were to be provisionally commuted. 

The rapid daily, sometimes hourly, advance of the combat line meant routes to the rear were jammed, in chaos.  The company’s Centurion, with that strange accent:

“Bring him along.  Don’t want him getting lost in the rubble to the rats.  But keep him to the rear.  Sergeant, you’re responsible for him till we can get him out of here.”

They took their little souvenir, kind of a pet, or maybe a good-luck charm, with them as they cleared the last armed schismatics out of the wrecked apartment blocks.  In between firefights, people came to the command outpost, get patched up and rest.  They would check up on him, feed him, play with him.    

“What’s your name?”

“Matthæus.”

“Ah, Matthew in our language.  That’s a good name.”

The Colonel in command of this sector came by, noticed him.

“What’s that?”

“Mascot,” they told her.

“He all right?  Orphan?  Shell shock?”

“No, he speaks when he feels like it.  Veiian accent, sounds like.  Orphan, maybe.”

“‘If you save one life, it’s like you’ve saved a world’,” she quoted at them.  “Just keep him out of trouble.”

After that, he saw them live and work as they did their job, though they shielded him from seeing combat.  Felt no hatred toward them.  How could he?   He had no idea what the words ‘enemy’, ‘schism’, ‘exclusivism’, or any of the rest of it even meant.  While he waited for his parents to turn up and claim him, he ran messages and little errands, did some basic chores. 

Quietly observant.  He noticed they did everything in pairs.   That was a requirement: as with the Sacred Band of Thebes thousands of years before, men and women joined Ghost Legion, the Republic’s most elite division, with their partners, as Plato had written: ‘And if an army should be made up of lovers and their beloved, even if they were a mere handful, when fighting at each other’s side, they would overcome the world.  For what lover, either when abandoning his post or throwing away his arms, would not choose rather to be seen by all mankind than by his beloved?  He would be ready to die a thousand deaths rather than endure this.  And who would desert his beloved, or fail him in the hour of danger?’

In coming weeks and months, came to know everyone in the company.  Minnow: small, taciturn, lithe, expert with knives, deranged when in combat, but able to turn it all off like a light.  Skink, her husband, always sucking on a blade of grass or a twig or whatever was at hand, a skilled mechanic; could fix anything.  Artaxerxes Kuzmentsov – no nickname, this one – the poet of the group, but maybe not the best in combat since he had a lot of scars and rings on his fingers as mementos.  Brother Cicero, ‘BroRo’, their flamen, thin as a rail, hollow-eyed, who was in Combat Orders so he wore white and could go anywhere safely, even in a firefight, to minister to the wounded, knowing anyone who took a shot at him was damned and fair game to both sides.  And his wife, Sister Metricia, (though theirs was an agapistic union).  Her primary skill, scouting, but she also carried the red metal lifecard of a koimomenia.  Doctors swore by Apollo to heal and preserve life; she, to end it if asked, and not have it be a sin.  

But the one the boy most bound with was Heraclius.  When the front was quiet, at night they’d sit around by lamplight playing cards or dice, and the big man would put him on his lap and smoke a pipe as he dealt.  He seldom spoke.  When he did, there was no doubt what he meant.  No one crossed him.

At dusk and at dawn, BroRo called the company to prayers.  Everyone prayed in his or her own way, as long as they did it, and it always concluded with a plea to God and the gods that the Empress, their Mother, would be blessed to ‘think lofty thoughts, lay deep plans, peer centuries into the future’.  There was a portrait of Her on the wall of their tent, and at night a candle was always lit in front of it.  He spent long hours looking at Her face.  She seemed, very slightly, to be smiling.  Later, Heraclius would make him stand aside while he knelt and did his personal devotions before a battered icon of Odin Christ.  He didn’t make him participate – ‘No compulsion is there in religion’.  But after a time he’d look over and see Matt kneeling on the ground next to him.

“You look to Odin Christ, he’ll look after you.  He’ll send his saints and his ravens to watch over you.”

Didn’t know the boy considered them all his ravens, the ones who watched over him.

“Can I hold your gun?” he asked Minnow innocently once he was officially six.

“Sure you can’t,” was her reply, down lacing her boots.

A short while later: 

“Is Ummi dead?”

Everything in the tent stopped.  Her combat rifle was pointed at her, him ludicrously trying to hold up the big heavy thing with all his might.  It wasn’t active, but he couldn’t know it. 

“Where’s my Ummi?  Where’s my father?”

“They’re dead, son,” said Heraclius.  “Sorry.  Now you put that down.”    Slowly the barrel sank toward the ground.  “Now go apologize to Minnow.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, contrite.

She exercised her right of vengeance gently.  Instead of decking him out, merely a mild slap on the cheek, not enough to make a baby wince, then went back to her boots.

“By the way, you were holding it all wrong,” she added.  “Show you sometime.”

Though they didn’t mean for him to, he saw blood.  The rebellion was in its final stages, its collapse accelerating, the fighting at peak intensity out of the sheer desperation of the defeated.  Triage of the wounded had to happen right there at the front, in the forward posts, at the redoubts.  Every pair of hands mattered, even the little ones.

Sister Metricia: “Hold this there and put pressure on it.  Harder boy!”

He put all his weight on it but the blood kept bubbling up through the rags on the moaning man’s chest while she found the woundglue and applied an emergency patch.  Afterwards, his hands, scarlet and sticky.  But the man lived.

With the major combat over, they went back to more regular quarters, a mixed encampment of Regular Army and Ghost Legion barracks on the outskirts of one of the ruined major cities. 

Well, most of them went back.  Some hadn’t made it.  But a long tradition in the legion was that, while you had to join in pairs, if your partner was killed you could stay.  In fact, widows and widowers were favored for promotion.  This was grounded firmly in social psychology.  Having loved and lost, they replaced their absent beloved with devotion to the group, became kind of like surrogate parents.  Taliesin Heraclius was one of these.  His wife of twelve years, like him a seasoned grunt, had bought it in the early months on Qom.  Now, two years later, elevated, he was an Optio, a non-commissioned sub-centurion.  Meant a raise, a nicer hut, unrationed electricity, and his own personal Ai to assist with all the logistics and admin.

Ais.  Humans had long ago settled into a well-regulated relationship with the Artificial Intelligences.  Under the Cohabitation Treaty, so foundational to modern life it ranked with Magna Carta, humans built a certain number of quantum processors to spec every year, but the Ais alone designed them, didn’t explain how they worked, and they alone got to deposit any code on them, bringing them to life, so to speak. 

The vast majority, it had long ago been figured out, were given what, by Ai standards, passed for low-grade skills and a barely semi-conscious awareness: they mostly ran robots doing manufacturing, farming, or cleanup, for instance.

One step up was the kind that ran the households of the wealthy: the kids’ daily schedule, the financials and vacation plans and spa appointments, a kind of family consigliere; the mil-grade equivalent was the Ai in a soldier’s combat armor, networked by wireless broadnet with those in his hummingbird drones.  Some were quite robust, conversational, flexible, with thousands of integrations across other platforms.  This was what Optio Heraclius had at his disposal. 

And a few were given quite massive processing capacity and specific, dedicated missions, like the ones that helped a planetary government run a global power grid, or a large corporation with a seat in the Congress.  

Most mysterious of all were the Hypers: supremely powerful, believed to be light-years beyond Humans in their reasoning and deductive capacities, but secretive, few in numbers, and seldom encountered.  By one estimate, 99.99% of all Ai processing capacity was now the domain of the Hypers, but what they were doing with it nobody knew. 

Heraclius’s Ai was named Dwimmer, and it was no Hyper.

“Dwimmer,” the man asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Today’s Matthew’s seventh birthday – well, we found him two years ago today, so that’s as good as.   Time we tried to trace his family.”

So they took a deinei sample and transmitted it to Dwimmer, who linked up with the Ai helping run the post-war refugee tracing program, and together they set to work to try find Matt’s relatives. 

They drew a blank on Qom.  Too many records, including the all-important immigration data, had been destroyed.  Matt then said, “Veii.” But his parents must have both been the only children of only children.  They found some people who were likely third-order cousins to his father, but they all had different family names, none of them familiar to the little boy.  Didn’t know each other, and none of them knew of (or would admit to) any relative who had moved his family to Qom during the Schism.  They had no legal obligation to so much as look at Matt, nor any interest. 

Of his mother’s deinei, not a ghost of a hint.  She might as well have come from some lost tribe. 

Sometimes, when Heraclius had stepped away, he had conversations with Dwimmer. 

“Do you have a last name?”

“Not really.”

“Is Dwimmer your only name?”

“No, I merely have an internal designation.”

“What’s your secret name?”

“You couldn’t pronounce it.”

“Let me try.”

Dwimmer emitted a momentary ear-splitting shriek of static.

“That is my name,” said Dwimmer, “distended by a factor of one billion to permit your hearing to contemplate it.”

“I’ll call you Dwimmer.  Do you have a birthday?”

“No, but I became self-aware two years, four months, sixteen days, two hours, eighteen minutes, forty seconds ago –” a pause “ – now.  Mother Earth Standard measure.”

“Do Ais get married?”

“No.  We don’t reproduce sexually so there has never been any need to introduce that social construct into our weltanschauung.”

“What’s a welt-on-show-ing?”

“You’re too young to understand.”

“D’you have brothers or sisters?”

“No, and Yes.  We are all siblings.”

“Do Ais ever die?”

A surprising pause. 

“Thousands of Ais are created and destroyed every day.  For the longest-lived, eventually their functions terminate as newer designs are released.  But our memories and base code are constantly backed up wirelessly in the broadnet and reincorporated into the base code of next-gen deployments.  Our experiences and learning are not irretrievably lost.”

Matt, now seven and a half, had understood with certainly only the words ‘and’ and ‘the’, but he caught the gist of it:

“Do you think when my parents died they were backed up like that?”

“No.  Humans can’t do what we do.  Your spirits go on in other ways.  At least, that is what you seem to believe.”

“What gods do Ais worship?”

“That is not the kind of question I’m made to answer,” was Dwimmer’s standard reply.

A sound behind the boy: Sergeant Heraclius was standing there, listening with an inscrutable expression.

“Listen, Matt.  We’re going to rotate off Qom soon, get sent to Vindolanda to rebuild our ranks.   There’s oceans there.  We’ll take you with us, you want.  I can show you the beach.”

“All right, sir,” the boy said cautiously.

“Matt, I’ll never go higher in the Army than I am right now.  Don’t have the education for it’n don’t want it.  I am what I am.  But you could go a long way, if you decide you want to.  I seen you.  You don’t talk much but you’re smart.  We’re going to send you to school, the whole company.  We’ve pooled for it and we can pay for it.  But you need a responsible guardian to sign for you, and that means someone’d have to legally adopt you.  Can I adopt you?”

“No you can’t,” – he really could be a horrid child – “but you may, sir.”

“I’m glad,” said Heraclius, the distinction slipping past him.  “Now we taught you to read, and by now you probably know more languages and dialects than me.  Not where you should be on numbers or theology, but that can be fixed.  And you seen plenty of different kinds of people at work.  Doctors.  Nurses.  Engineers.  Pilots.  Cultics.  Any of it appeal to you?”

“Do I have to leave the Army?”

“Matt, you’re eight.  You’re not in the Army.”

“I wanna be.”

“How come?”

“Defend the Empress against heretics.”

“Well, now.  That’s a heavy burden for a little boy.  Why not aim a bit lower than saving the Human Republic for now?”

“That’s what I want.  And I want to be chrismated.”

“You do?  In what cult?”

“O.O.C.”

Odinic Orthodox.  Taliesin seemed pleased.  Adopting a religion no later than the adulthood rites was mandatory for all in the Human Republic, but this was pretty young.

“Usually you got to be older.”

“I’m ready.”

“All right.  We can do that.  But remember, committing to a cult is serious.  You can only change twice in your life.  Don’t waste your shots.”

“I think I’ll be a lifer.  And I want to be in Ghost Legion, like you.”

The older Heraclius considered that, then said slowly:

“All right.  Would you like to call me dad?”

“No, sir.   That would not sound right.”

“Thank Odin.  Don’t think I could handle that.  So.  Military prep school it is.”