It only takes a moment to make a change: to spare a life or to ruin it.

Traffic was slow, but making progress in the afternoon rush hour through downtown Portland. I wondered whether I needed to call ahead to the shooting range where I worked. If the traffic slowed any more, I would get stuck on a bridge over the Columbia. I decided to wait a while longer, since it might clear up.

I’d been playing pass and pass again with a school bus for several blocks, and the children’s faces pressed into the glass and waved as I was passed again. I even waved back when it was safe. They must have been on their way back from some outing.

The road squeezed into a narrow spot between two quad-block skyscrapers when, ahead and across the road, the beast crashed through a window and onto the street. Larger than my two-door commuter and covered with rust-colored plates, I recognized the Model Six tank-type alien. Traffic swerved left and right like water, parting around a boulder as the alien turned. I saw it lock eyes on the bus and gather itself to leap at it.

The bus, running on autopilot, was slowing down. Its emergency response program was making exactly the wrong choice at this time.

I only had a moment to decide, a choice so easy it didn’t feel like one at all. I threw a command at my own car’s computer, switching from guided mode to full manual. That was followed up with two more, sending the emergency override and collision avoidance software into a spiral as I hammered the accelerator. Half a ton of alien flesh met a little less in metal and plastic as I rammed the beast, catching it before it could hit the nearly-stopped bus.

The world turned white as air cushions exploded before me in an instant of pillowy protection. One of the doglike Model Threes slammed into the driver-side door, and more cushiony explosions joined, this time from the door beside me.

I sent a signal, and my seatbelt was released, letting me scramble out the passenger door. A glance ahead showed that the Model Six was moving but not standing yet. I should have known it would be able to survive the hit.

I could hear claws from the smaller alien as it scrambled up onto the roof. Somehow, in the collision, my rear passenger seat had shattered, probably due to the crumple zones deciding I needed a new car. This was not going to help my insurance rates. On the other hand, it let me reach in and grab my P5-AT light attack rifle out of my kit. I looked up to see the Model Three looking around for someone to devour.

For the first time in my life, I faced a live antithesis, one of the alien plant monsters. As I raised my weapon, I was once again hit by the very strangeness of the aliens. It lunged for me. I fell back onto my ass as I switched the rifle to full auto. The unbraced weapon jerked in my hand, and the Model Three fell despite half of the burst missing. “Aim, idiot. Aim first, then shoot.” I felt my face burn in embarrassment over the undisciplined spray. However, it did give me the time to stand and cradle the weapon properly.

Over my car’s hood, I saw four of them running through the traffic or trying to break into stopped cars. I’d grown up knowing that the aliens were trying to invade Earth. Being the child of generations of military vets, there was no way I could avoid the tales of the antithesis in their myriad forms. But while they were a constant threat, they had always been in the background for me. Attacks were something that happened to people who knew people I knew or that appeared on the news. I was acutely aware of how very real the situation was. Antithesis, here.

My hands were shaking, whether from fear or adrenaline wasn’t clear. But I still stood between the aliens and the kids on that bus. I hesitated, unsure if I should draw attention to myself.

The sounds of the street were strangely off-balance. Only human sounds broke the silence: people screaming, car alarms going off, and the muffled yells of people cowering in their cars. In the media, attacks by the beasts were filled with growling, howling, or barking. In reality, they were stone-quiet. A few models would make slight sounds. The Model Six could, but the Model Threes never issued a peep. It added to the surreality of them being here in the middle of town.

One, frustrated at not getting through the window at a passenger, turned its face towards me. The tri-part mouth opened beneath its uncanny eye-over-eye face. Officially called a Model Three, they had a bunch of names, some of them pure media hype. I preferred how the Cascadia Military used an M-Number designation, or even simply used the number at times. Shorter names for when talking faster could save the lives of teammates or civilians. The M-3 gathered its legs underneath it and jumped in my direction.

Years of training on the range kicked in as I switched to single-shot on my rifle. I took a hair longer to center my sights on the head before squeezing the trigger. The bullet landed right between the eyes, and the corpse fell between two cars, out of sight.

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I quickly shifted to another M-3 that was clawing at a windshield. One shot, and I moved on to the other two M-3s, killing each in turn.

In my so-called smart glasses, alert warnings flashed from the net, phone, and other emergency systems. They blocked my vision, so I flicked them away with a thought, unread.

The sound of rending metal drew my attention to the tank-like M-6 I had run into. It was standing again, though leaning to the side and favoring the two nearest front legs. I shot it five times, each shot finding a different gap in the armor. Three of the shots were not clean entries, sparking on the plates as they slipped through, but I figured they would still help; internal ricochets spread out the damage. After the last, the light 9mm rounds finally seemed to find something vital, and the beast died.

I felt a strange chill in the back of my head but ignored it to concentrate on the battle. Since there weren’t any more antithesis in sight, I stole some seconds to grab the rest of my tactical gear and shove it on.

It wasn’t much—a chest plate with a couple of attached magazines and two .45 cal automatic pistols in shoulder holsters. And I switched to my combat glasses.

I’d wanted to be in the armed forces since I was a child, and I trained for it extensively. But they wouldn’t take me, nor would any of the decent private military corporations. Neither the PMCs nor the military would accept a person who did not have augs.

Augs, properly called Ocular Augmentations, allowed people to send and receive signals for sight and sound from computers directly via a virtual screen input straight to the ocular nerve. About one in fifty thousand people were not compatible with the augs, including me. Fortunately, I could send commands out, or I would be a complete pariah. The fact that I could control computers more precisely than most with augs didn’t matter. I was a naught, and there was nothing that could change that.

It was hard to blame them. Modern military tactics rely heavily on teamwork and split-second coordination. It also relied on close integration with your gear. From ammo counts to your teammates position, there was so much data that an aug was required to display it all.

My workaround was to use data glasses—one pair for daily wear and another for combat. The combat ones were bulkier upgrades from my daily wear, with a better screen resolution, but it was still poor. Because of the poor resolution, you could only fit a tenth of the data you could get on most augments, plus the vulnerability of losing them in a bad hit.

It was theoretically possible to increase the resolution, but without sufficient market share, no corporation was going to spend billions on a low-cost design. In other words, only the super-rich could afford glasses with better data displays, which had to be custom-made. Some data was better than none, and I put on the glasses I had.

When I came around the school bus, a man was standing by the front door of the vehicle, looking around incoherently. He held a tiny pistol in his hand, which he waved around dangerously. I walked up to him and lifted his hand, so he wouldn’t accidentally shoot me. “Did anybody get hurt?”

The man blinked at me with a blank stare. I repeated my question. From inside, a smaller woman replied. “No, but the damn bus won’t move!” She was an older woman with plenty of wrinkles and a scowl that did not fit well with her laugh lines.

“Let me see what I can do,” I replied. Before I could climb on board the bus, a wave of heat and pressure washed over my head, pressing on both sides, above and behind my temples. I shook my head, and it faded.

At the driver’s seat, I pulled out a tablet from my pant’s side pocket and sent commands to it, linking to the bus’s primitive programming. A wave of ads and virus warnings flashed over the tablet until my custom-installed anti-ware blocked it all. After sending commands to the bus for a minute, I finally found a diagnostic response code that made sense. I passed by the school kids as I returned to where the old lady and the man were still milling around.

“The bus isn’t going anywhere. The server has shut it down, probably due to wherever those anthesis came from. We’ll have to get the kids somewhere safe.”

The man, probably either the driver or an administrator by the dress and cluelessness, started to hyperventilate. “Get it together!” the old lady yelled at him. “We can’t let the kids see us in a panic, or they will as well. We’re safe. Concentrate on that and the next step, which is getting the children out of here.” She turned to me. “Mister Gunman, do you know where we can take them?”

I looked around. We were sandwiched between two tall buildings, each of them an edifice of steel, concrete, and glass, spanning multiple city blocks. Between them, the sky was that blinding white-grey common between storms, not the red that would indicate a full, broadscale incursion.

I looked over the bus’s passengers, seeing only small children and a couple near the low teens. Walking the length of the buildings did not seem like a good idea with only two adults wrangling the children. And the building that the antithesis had come out of was not an option without a way to know how far the infestation had spread. That left the other side of the road.

I looked upwards and was happy to see that there was only one sky bridge between the two buildings. There was a large storefront facing us. I pointed with my rifle and shot out the glass door. “Start with going in there.” I yelled over the building’s alarm. “See if you can get someone in there to close up the sky bridge. Call for help, but keep going too. There should be a shelter in there somewhere.” By law, every building over a certain size had to have at least one Antithesis shelter, a public panic room for situations like this. The quality of the protection varied, corporate short cuts being a fact of life, but some shelter was better than none.

“And where will you be?” Mr. Administrator finally found his voice.

I pointed to the hole in the other building. “Someone has to hold the gap,” I said.