Job Interview, nine months ago.
“And what’s this about you being in a cult?” Paula asked.
“You can’t ask about religion,” I said with another sigh.
Paula stared at me, “Which one of us is HR?”
“You can’t-”
“It’s not a religion,” Sara said glancing at me.
“You don’t think the Samurai are Saints?” Paula asked.
I sighed louder. Everyone ignored me.
“The greatest gift the Protectors gave to humanity was the knowledge that there are no gods. No Saints. No Ghosts, or ancestral spirits. There is no heaven nor hell. There is only us, and our world. With no afterlife we must do as much good as we can now, in this life we are so lucky to live.”
“If you don’t worship them-” Paula left the question hang and I said nothing because she didn’t technically ask a question.
“We venerate them. We acknowledge that they are the best means that humanity has for survival. But we know they are human. In fact, we believe one of our great duties is to remind them they are human, as they can change so much that they lose connection with the rest of humanity.”
“So you aren’t going to be asking us for donations or to attend any creepy non-worship type meetings?” Paula asked.
“I will formally submit a request for donations, say, once a month. But I will not try to recruit anyone. I do reserve the right to make suggestions, again formally though electronic means, that you can deal with on your own time.”
“I see on your resume,” I said cutting off Paula’s next question.
----------------------------------------
We’d heard Sara had applied at a few companies on the floors above us before she'd come to us. I just assumed she lived in the tenant space near the ground and basement floors where it was cool enough to sleep through the night.
But she picked the building first and then tried to get closest to the top floor where her Samurai loving cult had taught her she could help if- when- another incursion occurred.
“Hello?” I said into the walkie-talky.
Technically it was marketed as a Samurai Logistic Radio. And technically it had been given out as a prize in some sort of cereal bar box. They had, to the best of my knowledge, started out as a gimmick for parents to trick their children with. The first generation was put in the boxes because they'd got them for less than the cost of the components. The factory that assembled them had failed to engineer for the possibility that the conveyor belts that supplied the speakers and receiving circuity would suddenly be bisected by a delivery van being driven by an ex-employee angry with the last round of layoffs.
So while the man wormed his way through the complex with several high powered submachine guns, the speakers and transmission circuits pilled up on the floor near the van failing to make it deeper into the facility where echoes of gunshots and screams were drowned out by machines assembling walkie-talkies with missing components.
The facility continued making walkie-talkies that would never be able to receive a signal, or produce a sound. In the end the tens of thousands of faulty units were sold at a steep discount. After all, where was the value in a walkie-talkie that only transmitted, but couldn't receive.
Children were told the walkie-talkies could contact Samurai on a special channel only the Samurai could hear. The gimmick worked so well the company continued buying walkie-talkies when their defective supply ran out.
As Sara explained it when she argued to add them to our READY bags. The devices may have started out as a cheap gimmick, but were no longer useless.
The cereal box promised kids that if they used it, a Samurai was listening on the other end. It was a gimmick. A way parents could trick their kids into thinking they were safe, but one that stuck and set them apart from their competitors.
As Sara had explained it a Samurai out of central America had set up short wave receivers and managed to catch and disappear a number of pedophiles by listening to the calls for help from children. The story spread and others were motivated to make receiver stations to help other children. That information was passed out to certain charities and hobby groups and various buildings in cities around the world sprouted another antenna.
It wasn't all roses. Like anything else it was open to corruption, grift, and evil. The walkie-talkies were unencrypted and mostly in the possession of children. Over time as different models were purchased most had the ability to receive and play messages. The devices once used to capture pedophiles began to be used by them to lure or trap children.
There was another wave of development and this time Samurai were directly involved. They provided cheap circuity with impossible encryption that only Samurai AIs could break. There were exchange programs and buy-back programs. In a few short months the value of an original faulty radio went through the roof as their rarity skyrocketed.
Then there was an incursion, mostly aquatic, near the Virgin Islands. The child abuse monitoring stations were able to be used by logistic operators of various charities and Samurai support groups around the world to help coordinate rescue efforts.
Sara insisted the models we had were sixth generation models. They could actually pick up return signals but the encryption was so strong it took a Samurai AI to break. Or at least tech created by a Samurai.
“Fuck!” I panted. I didn’t even have the energy to yell.
Nine floors. I’d convinced myself there were only nine more floors to go. Then eight. Then seven. I'd kept track.
Here I was at zero and only now did I realize that if a building was ninety-three stories tall, you have to climb ninety-four sets of stairs to get to the roof.
“One more,” I panted. I didn’t stop to rest. I knew how that would go. There was no short break in me. When I stopped it would be for a long time.
Past the 85th the floors were exposed to atmosphere in various ways. There was wind and machinery noise. Floor 90 was so loud with machinery noise that I had to clamp my hands over my ears as I climbed through it. That flat section of floor between the stairwells on that floor was so loud and hot I didn't even consider resting. I know the lower floors had pipes that rose all the way up the building as a way to passively draw air in and up to help keep things cool. But on the upper floors, open to the atmosphere, the heat cooked me.
One of the reasons this area had never fully recovered from first incursion it had experienced was the heat. As dry as it was the wet bulb temperatures could still climb to lethal levels. While we had an abundant amount of homelessness, we had no one living on the streets. You couldn't survive. Instead people clustered in buildings and created modified swam coolers with stretched sheets and water. Windows and sun-exposed places were covered in highly reflective Mylar or aluminum foil.
The stairwell was enclosed so I didn't see too much except upon reaching a new floor and looking down the hallway past the bank of elevators. I never went farther than that. While there was room to walk, many of the elevator doors were missing. Perhaps used elsewhere, perhaps for ventilation or some other purpose. It didn't matter. I couldn't bring myself to even pass the open shafts.
Instead I continued up.
There was a breeze at my back during the last ascent. It was not a comforting thing. Instead it felt like the doors to hell had opened behind me from the amount of heat blasting me. Worse it felt like hell was trying to push me up the stairs, as if it wanted me to ascend.
Standing on the top platform I was presented with a simple metal door. The air rushed up around me, a slight vortex created in the space as hot hot blasted up into the space above me and presumably out after passing through long thin slots in the metal above. I dared not stop. As I reached the door I put one hand on the horizontal bar to press in on it, and the other on the door itself. I jerked the hand back, even brief contact with the door had likely burned me.
I pressed in on the bar and the door popped open and jumped away from me. I took a quick step backward, my legs almost buckling at the energized moment. I'd assumed someone had pulled the door open and was in a hurry to get through, but it was the air pressure.
I pressed the bar again and exited out onto the roof. The temperature had been climbing as I had but the rood was unbearable.
I put my hands on my knees, more to look under the crisscrossing bars of metal that supper the solar panels that blocked my view than to catch my breath.
I saw her.
She had the fucking red backpack beside her and a same bullet proof vest, one I should be wearing.
There was someone beside her.
Two someones I noted when I shifted to look to her left, the view temporarily blocked from where I stood.
I didn’t see an obvious path through all the metal supports for the solar panels above, so I dropped to my hands and knees and crawled across the tiny pea stone of the rooftop. There was a rhythmic sound, slow enough I couldn't place it, and the high speed whirling of several wind generators.
The air burned my lungs and the roof stones were almost too hot to touch even in the shade provided by the solar panels above.
It was painful in a way I was almost sure wasn’t going to injure or harm me long term, but that didn't get any better by going slower or being more careful. It was just the last leg of a journey that hurt for no reason at all.
“Sara,” I called out.
Greg of all people was the one to her right.
“Fred?” he asked.
Sara, hadn’t turned and instead touched Greg, who bent his head back down and forward.
I could hear them talking as I got closer.
There were three of them. Greg and the other guy were both in the football pad tactical armor shit in the green and reds of the building.
Sara’s small form was between them.
There was an edge, maybe waist high that hid everything I could see from where I was on my hands and knees. The two men were kneeling on kneepads behind the wall and resting their arms on top of it. She was squatting in some serious looking boots. Her small well worn shoes were setting near an unwrapped garbage bag.
There were several empty garbage bags held down by bricks.
Possibly to store the absolutely monster of a rifle that Greg was staring through and the huge monocular braced on a small monopod that Sara was looking through.
Had they planned this? How long had the items waited up?
The other guy was set up with a normal looking assault rifle and was looking up at the sky, not down at the city.
I sat near Greg, my back to the wall, breathing hard for a while and listening to Sara talk into the Walkie-talkie every so often.
“This is operator two-seven, two-zero, four-four. Gila River Indian Reservation incursion. I’m oversight on the rooftop of Helios Tower. I’ve got eyes on live civilian evacuees and xeno initial touch down locations. How copy?”
Then she would wait a bit, speaking softly to the man to her left and then to Greg. When the men spoke back she wrote down something on her tablet.
“Hi Freddy,” she said during the next round of whispers, including me in whatever this was.
“You can keep a look out for fliers," she said.
I was handed a set of binoculars. They weren’t even the good kind the sold for "bird watching." In the heat here, the only birds I'd seen were the ones that lived in the sewer gratings or nested in the subways. But it was easier to market binoculars for birds than it was for peeping on neighboring buildings.
The cheap devices sure as fuck didn’t have any sort of stabilization technology inside because I could hardly see anything until I put my elbows on the far-too-hot rampart and then tried to look through them. The heat bled through my clothing instantly. I lifted my elbows at first, intending to only use them when I needed to stabilize the view. But I soon found without my elbows on the rampart I had to control my body with my exhausted and flabby core.
I didn't even consider standing up. It had been difficult enough to wiggle into a kneeling position.
She made it through two more cycles of speaking into the radio and then asking the two men what else they had spotted before adding the information to her tablet, before I shifted, standing up with the intention of leaning my back against one of the metal supports.
Instead I got a look over the edge of the almost waist high wall and about shit myself.
I’m sure I screamed as I flung myself backward away from the edge.
Eventually I stood, well away from the edge and rested my arms on a crossbar of the metal making up the solar array. No one said anything.
“This is operator two-seven, two-zero, four-four. Gila River Indian Reservation incursion. I’m oversight from the rooftop of Helios Tower. I’ve got eyes on live civilian evacuees and xeno initial touch down locations. How copy?”
“Good copy operator two-seven two-zero four-four," A female voice responded, "Send it.”
“Fuck yeah!” Greg said under his breath.
Sara leaned away from the wall and lifted her tablet so it rested on her knees and leaned against the rampart.
From this angle I could see it wasn't a tablet. It was a white board type thing. No tech. I remembered something about that. As the models grew in complexities some of them had biologies that could jam huge ranges of radio frequencies effectively flooding the airwaves with static noise. Others could use moth-like antenna to pin point and track radio transmissions. Except I think those were stealth models, which I wasn't exactly sure were real or not. Most countries in the world had laws about Anthesis information, namely you couldn't lie or make stuff up about it. But with corporate control and the market those were lax when it came to interactive games, movies, and other media. I hadn't spent any extra time outside of my general education requirements when it came to the xeno threat. I figured I knew enough, they all wanted to wipe us out to the very last man. Not even that. To the very last piece of organic matter. Grass wouldn't survive when they were done.
They'd take over the world, eat everything, transform it into some sort of huge interstellar satellite dish. Pick out planets with high radio frequencies that indicated water or other organic compounds and then shoot slow pods, like seeds traveling through space on a ten thousand year flight. All the while they'd be evolving done their own technological paths until they created a sort of hybrid teleportation-slash-faster-than-light drive. They'd target star systems and when they had enough energy send an incursion to some other unsuspecting solar system. Possibly towards some other intelligent life.
Sara's words snapped me out of my thousand-yard-stare. She had grease pencil looking pen in one hand ready to check items off.
“Using cord system N, A, two-one-two, copy?”
“NA, two-one-two copy," the voice responded from the walkie-talkie. Something caught my eye and I turned my head. Looking at the city far below was okay so long as I was also looking far from the base of the building. It just looked like I was looking down at the swarm of birds that twisted and spun through the air.
For the briefest moment I felt that purity of joy that belongs wholly to children. I hadn't seen a flock of birds, let alone one moving like that, in reality in my entire life.
Then, as they crested a peak and shot back down, my eyes saw the humans in the street that had just begun to scatter. They didn't have enough time, and I looked away before the swarm merged with the tiny humans. I didn't bring the binoculars up, nor track the model ones. Instead I worked the muscles of my throat, trying to stop myself from vomiting.
“I’ve got eyes on rooftop civilians ready for pick up at eighteen-point-four-four. Time stamp current," Sara was saying.
She continued reading off coordinates and time stamps most of them current. Then she started moving backward with things like, “Current-minus-eight minutes.”
“End civy report. Xeno cords ready. How copy?” Sara said.
“End civy, Ready on the Xeno Sara, send it," the other woman said.
They were both entirely too calm for my likely. Another swarm of model ones had risen above the distant buildings' roofs before diving back down.
I felt entirely too hot. Like I was boiling. Someone should be screaming shouldn't they? If not now, when?
“Incursion pods visible from this location. Confirming cords-”
Sara was all business, calm, collected, even as Greg spoke and she added something to her board with the pen.
After she read the xeno pod crash locations she reported several locations with model one fliers visible. They were circling buildings riding up on the thermals but not going farther than that. Not yet. They’d have a few solo fliers out but most would get a swarm up and then take off.
“Thank you Sara. How safe is your location?”
“No xenos,” Sara responded.
“Roger that. Let me know when your situation changes. And it’s Rose, nice to talk to one of our own. There are Samurai in bound but the greater Phoenix metropolis was hit as well so the closest that have reported in are headed there, to the highest population density.”
“Understood, Rose.”
“Fuck yeah baby girl!” Greg said with a laugh. He offered a fist to Sara who bumped it.
They talked back and forth for a while like nothing was happening. I was sort of in awe of it.
Then there was a swarm of model ones that spiraled up and moved out into the city past the building they’d been circling.
“Rose how copy?”
“Clear. Send it.”
Sara reported the model one movement and direction somehow estimating a hundred and fifty of the fliers. There was mostly silence as Greg and the other man gave her information. I looked through the binoculars a few times but everything I could see from where I stood was too far away to make anything out, and I was unwilling to move closer to the edge.
I sometimes felt useless, like all the effort I'd put in was pointless, but I very rarely felt like I was a weight around someone else's neck. I wondered now how many people would die because I was unwilling to get close to an edge I knew I wasn't going to fall over. I knew I was safe, and yet I couldn't move.
Sara spoke up, informing Rose about some model threes visible on the streets and their coordinates.
Half a minute later something excited happened. Sara was too short to see it where she knelt so she stood. The other two followed and they spoke in whispers as they watched something.
When Rose told her to "Send it," I could hear the smile in Sara's previously emotionless voice.
“Possible BS. No confirmation. Cords twenty-one point three-nine. Headed east. Explosives and at least eight dead model threes or fours. Time stamp Current minus six.”
“Possible BS copy. Hooray” Rose said.
“Hooray. Copy.” Sara repeated.
They both spoke the word instead of cheering, but I was compelled to ask.
“What’s the BS?”
“Baby Samurai,” Greg said over his shoulder. “Explosions and a big body count, could be a civy or the like but most likely its a brand new Samurai. Hooray!” Greg said and he shouted it.
Sara and the still-nameless man to her left repeated the word.
“Hooray,” I said.
“Sara how copy?” the walkie-talkie chirped.
“Clear, go.”
“I’m patching you in to PMC All Bright logistic control. They've got a people mover coming in for VIP extraction and two Papa-Echoes, carrying twelve count each. Recommendations?”
What followed was a three way conversation where a twenty-one year old girl with a walkie-talky she got from a cereal box standing on the roof of a condemned skyscraper directed a giant hover bus full of private military contractors to a VIP safe room. While at the same time directing two placer-extractor teams who landed on rooftops in fast moving vehicles just long enough to touch down, set up auto-turrets, and then lift off with any survivors they could fit on the transports.
I watched them rescue twenty five people because of Sara. More than that I realized she’s decided who to save, or more likely which location was best for both line of fire and had civilians on the roof hoping for extraction.
I was looking at a distant building, and the fliers flying around it, when an explosion took out several windows.
“Operator be advised,” Sara began without asking how they copied, “Possibly BS at cords-”
There was a brief three way conversation and the PMC had their two placer-extractors back in the air and racing toward the building where the Samurai might be blowing stuff up.
I was closer to the edge now, staring at the building through the binoculars, listening to Sara direct the PMC, when the door on that distant rooftop opened. Everything was so tiny and my hands and arms shook. I tried to hold my breath but I was cooking so badly I had to go back to panting or risk dropping from the heat.
I was invested through, doing my best to stare unblinking through the tiny device as important events unfolded.
Model ones circling above the building dived. There were bursts of contiguous gunfire and then a black thing half the size of the human shifted and began to spin up.
“Operator be advised- Confirmed BS. Confirmed BS at cords. Eighteen-forty-one. Scratch that. Eighteen-forty. BS on rooftop engaging model one, fifty count.”
“Copy copy Sara, BS eighteen-forty.”
“PMC be advised live fire auto turrets unknown FOF. Unknown Friend or Foe. How copy.”
“Copy oversight. This is PE-alpha actual. How fares the BS? Is LZ clear?” The radio was filled with noise and it was a man’s voice this time instead of All Bright's female logistic officer who had joined Rose for most of the three-way conversations.
“LZ clear. BS has control. Estimate two minutes on remaining flock.”
Another turret popped into existent next to the Samurai. It shifted a bit and started firing. More of the level ones began dropping.
There was ten or fifteen seconds of silence as the battle raged. We were so far away I didn't hear a single sound above the machinery behind me and the wind.
It didn't seem real. Watching it like this. I lowered the binoculars but this far away, with my old eyes, only the flock was semi-visible, and that only because it was backed by sky.
“PE-alpha be advised xenos on the exterior of the building. Model Three's headed up," Sara said.
I snapped the binoculars up, grunted when I poked myself in the eye and then three valuable seconds trying to find the building again.
“How’s that LZ looking?” the PMC man on the hover ship asked as I struggled to find the battle.
“Clear clear. BS at North-East corner. Turrets north side." Sara said. Her voice calm and clear and collected. Whereas my heart was beating a million miles a minute.
I found the fight. xenos were on the roof with the him, but things were dying under multiple tracer filled lines of fire.
“Roger roger. This is PE-alpha actual going for touch down and extraction. Cross your fingers on that FOF for us.”
I saw Greg try to cross his fingers but his gloves were too thick.
I wiped sweat away from my forehead. Or tried, as I found it dry.
“What’s happening?” I asked.
“Auto-turrets might fire on the PMC hover ship,” Greg said.
“Fuck,” I whispered.
The xenos were half way up the building but it was clear the model ones would be dead before the level threes made it up to the roof.
The two black bus looking ships came into view. Or had been in view, but I didn’t know where to look. One slowed and pulled back, the other continued on.
“LZ South-East corner clear?”
“South-East clear,” Sara confirmed.
The bus zipped in, lifted up, presented is bottom to the roof as it decelerated swiftly enough that I’d have lost my lunch if I was on it.
Then it sat down obstructing our view of the Samurai.
As it began to lift off a mere moment later the walkie-talkie chirped.
“PE-alpha actual, we have the Samurai, pulling back to forward position two.”
When the xenos clawing up the outside of the building reached the edge and began to crawl over the remaining turrets turned to fire into them.
Eventually the turrets were overwhelmed and I pulled the binoculars away from my face. I'd stepped forward several times in my excitement and was far too close to the edge for my liking.
having returned to the solar panel structure I begged for water, and Greg handed me a bottle from his pack. It was somehow chilled.
Six minutes later the two black busses returned escorting a long black bus and several other clearly civilian public transportation buses that had been drafted into military service.
All the vehicles had guns sprouting from them.
“Force multiplier,” I said, remembering something Sara had once said.
The true power in a Samurai wasn’t in the tech, big guns, or fancy clothing. The true power was in being force multipliers.
A hundred PMCs were nothing, but give a Samurai a hundred PMC soldiers and they were ten times as strong. Give a Samurai a month at a water treatment facility and they could revamp it in ways humans couldn’t. Give them a access to a cereal factory, or a satellite, or a farm, and watch in awe at what they could accomplish.
In no time at all Sara went from busy, to constantly radioing in information, pausing only long enough to allow Rose to say, “copy.”
Then Greg’s gun was firing.
“Say again? Model eight?” Rose interrupted.
“Copy. Model eight confirmed,” Sara said.
“Whys that important?” I asked. I could tell from the conversation that it'd been important. When Greg had told Sara she'd stopped to confirm it herself staring down the scope of his long rifle. Then Rose hadn't believed her at first either. It wasn't adding up to something good.
“Too soon to see them,” Sara said. Then she was back to speaking into the radio.
“When do we leave?” I yelled at one point. Greg was firing what looked like straight down to me though I was sure it had to be several buildings over. Not that I was going to move to the edge and check.
“We are making a difference,” Sara said.
“Even that Samurai gave up!” I snapped.
That wasn’t exactly true. The airship he’d been on had crashed. There was a model twelve which apparently had an ass that could fuck up electronics. All Bright was flying standard tech transports. Those transports had just sort of turned off. The Samurai was confirmed to have survived but air support and rescue was over with.
The skies were filling with model ones. Between the PMC and the Samurai they had placed a shit ton of turrets on the roofs. Still the turrets were throwing bullets. The tactics had changed. Now the model ones would circle the building while the model threes clawed their way up the outside. Then the model ones would spiral up from the building up and up and the turrets would track and kill them and then the model threes would go over the edge in a wave to take the turrets out.
It didn’t matter how many died so long as they took the turrets out. Minutes later one of the worms would be visible gobbling up the dead. I couldn't follow all the ground activity but it seemed that the xenos were starting to take back rooftops faster than humans could plant turrets on them.
“This is wrong,” Sara said at one point.
“Rose. What’s the projected time line here. Is it accelerated?”
“Copy that Sara. They are still working projections but working theory is this a Sumba expansion rush.”
“Copy.”
Sara shifted back and sat down on the roof.
A moment later she looked back at me, then Greg, then the other man. My asshole was puckered tighter than the drop on a rollercoaster. I was in full panic mode just from that look. Was that a we-are-already-dead look? What the fuck was it? What they hell was a Sumba expansion or whatever Rose had said. I wanted to ask, but I couldn't speak.
“Sumba’s incursion didn’t follow the normal expansion," Sara said, "Instead of digging in to fortify the hive and make a long term stronghold the hive put almost all of it’s energy into mobile unit production. When the hive was destroyed it was the size of a day old hive, not the five day old hive it actually was. The downside was the local area was overrun and a secondary hive was established in the sea offshore.”
“So we go?” Greg asked.
“You should go,” she said, “I can still be useful here.”
Greg had been firing the rifle for some time even as she spoke. The measured time between the cracks of shots firing was just over a second. He didn't stop at the suggestion to leave.
When the other man opened up, it sounded like full auto to me.
Things went back to normal, calling in coordinates I didn't understand and occasionally survivor locations.
Then there were model ones in the air around us. Silent and far larger than they had any right to be.
I screamed, the sound ripping out of me. I had to fight, I knew that but I didn't know what to do, so I tried to do everything at once and didn't remain standing because of it.
I rolled on the roof and fought with the fucking holster at my hip while their guns fired around me as they barked orders back and forth.
By the time I got the weapon free the gunfire had stopped and people were shuffling by me in crouched duct-walks to stay under the metal supports.
“We’re leaving," Sara said as she passed.
We made it to the stairs without any further xeno contact.
Sara informed Rose we were moving and that they were losing her, unless they really needed her to stay.
I couldn’t believe she offered. There was green blood on the stones of the roof. They'd be back, and she offered to stay?
Thankfully Rose wished her safe travel and reported that the Gila River extraction point was currently fortified and safe.
Sara had a strap over her chest with a smaller gun. Some sort of submachine gun or mini-rifle or the like. She had a pistol on her hip that looked a lot like the one I realized I was still carrying.
I took a moment to holster it.
There was a handrail and we were going down, so I was fairly certain I wouldn’t slow the group down unless we had to walk down past the 84th floor. I was confident that Greg could call an elevator up, but didn’t want to ask for fear he’s say he couldn't, and I wanted as much hope as I could have.
It started with a look.
I can’t remember who looked over their shoulder as they rounded one of the switchbacks first, but a couple floors down I’d been asked twice if I was doing okay.
I’d answered quickly. Partially out of annoyance, and partially because I was out of breath.
When we hit 91 Greg spoke up.
“Something’s wrong,” he said, “should be louder. Much louder.”
“Drums are out of pressure?” the other man asked.
“Fly wheel and make-up water pumps should still be running."
The other man grunted and lifted his weapon to his shoulder as he peeked over the edge.
That said everything that needed saying.
It wasn’t like stopping was a good idea.
We continued on.