Camp Surrender

 The camp had low walls topped with steel net, which is turn was surmounted with coils of barbed wire.  It looked like it was intended to keep people from getting out; in fact it was to prevent people from getting in.  People in this warzone, at least, seemed to feel that a willingness to surrender was tantamount to a death wish.

The walls were made from local stone, mostly culled from fallen houses and barns.  The warzone had been here for six months before moving on and had flattened a lot of the structures.  Thankfully no-one had been salting the earth at that point so the ground was still fairly healthy and, despite the occasional bombing raid, there were fields of crops in and around the camp.

With little surprises hidden inside them, just in case the combatants decided that they could sneak up on the surrender camp.

Juan was sat in an office high up in the camp.  They’d built the camp deliberately on several levels with good lines of sight throughout, and there were defensive snipers posted at eight points around the perimeter.  Cameras made sure that there were no dead spots, and they fed their visual and auditory data to four different security points.  Nothing moved in the camp in a remotely suspicious manner without being investigated quickly.  The cost was ridiculous: Juan had seen the staffing bill and had been astonished by it, but it was effective.  People came and surrendered and were airlifted out of the zone to somewhere safer, and it worked every time.

An icon flashed blue on his screen and he inspected it and then clicked on it to acknowledge it.  A window opened up: someone wanted to chat.

“We have a new surrender,” read the message.  “He’s from the North American warzone.”

Juan’s fingers flickered lightning fast across the keyboard.  He’d learned to type in coding school for competitive coding tasks: knowing your data structures was essential, but being able to write the code faster than anyone else gave you more time to test it and get it bang on.  “We have no camp in the North American warzone,” he typed back.  “They’re a mole.”

“They’re here in Lviv,” replied the message.  Juan clicked on another icon for typing speed analysis and comparison.  You could never be too careful.

“Lviv?” he replied.  That was the centre of operations, how would a North American get there to surrender?

“Indeed,” replied the message.  The computer beeped: textual analysis complete.  Colonel Anna is typing with 88.7% certainty.

“Colonel Anna,” he typed, addressing her formally.  “How could a North American travel to Lviv to surrender?”

There was a slight delay and he was certain that she was running an analysis of his typing now.  “They are a general,” came the reply.  He guessed he’d been validated.  “Three star, so no mean feat, but they travelled as an observer of the Institute.”

The Institute for Surrender, the overarching body that Juan worked for and fervently believed in.  There was no other belief that would see the world through to the end of this nearly decade-long war, surely.

“Like the old days,” he said, not having a clue what they old days had been like.  “When they had the Iron Curtains.”

“Iron Curtain.”  You couldn’t send humour easily over text when emoticons and emojis were prohibited but he was sure that she was laughing at him.  She might remember the old days, or at least have seen footage of them.

“Sure,” he typed.  “Just testing.”

“Of course you were.  We’re accepting his surrender, of course.”

“Right.”  Juan pondered that while watching the flickering text Typing… at the top of the messaging app.  “And Central Ops have determined that your camp is strategically where he should be.”

“Oh hell no!”  It wasn’t like he hadn’t guessed before she hit Send but that didn’t mean he liked the idea.  A high-profile surrender like that would be hunted for by the North American sides and they, despite not being very successful at winning a war, still had excellent intelligence gathering.  He considered it again while she typed, wondering if he was overreacting.  He’d decided he wasn’t before she replied.

“It’s not actually a choice,” she replied, “as Central Ops have some pretty specific plans in mind that won’t work unless he’s at your camp.  They think they have an opportunity here to push Operation Rosa forward.”

Juan rubbed his jaw, thinking about that.  Operation Rosa had been stalled for nearly three years and could do with some attention and a boost.  But he’d prefer not to have to get it by importing a high profile surrender.

“Surely there’s ano—“

He was cut off by Colonel Anna.  “No.  Save it Juan, it’s been decided.”

“How’s he getting here then?”  There was no way he could fly on a commercial flight now he’d surrendered; the North Americans had no compunctions about blowing aeroplanes up or shooting them down whether they were in the warzone or not.  “Military jet?”  Even that wasn’t safe, but if there was a chance of not having to have the general, he was willing to take it.

“Diplomatic crate.”

Juan groaned out loud and then looked around his office.  It was empty, naturally, but he still got up and checked outside the door to make sure no-one had heard him.  Then he locked the door, just to be sure, and went back to his desk.

“You still there?” read the message from Colonel Anna.

“Yes,” he typed, wishing that he could find a way to refuse the surrender.  “Jesus, a live diplomatic crate.  Again?”

“You got a better idea?”

He really didn’t.

The Iron Womb

 A cold front had pushed down from the Arctic circle and covered Britain two days ago and was showing no signs of moving.  What would have been a dismal December rain under normal circumstances was now a feathery-light ballet of snowflakes, whirling in the streetlights and covering the pavements with a crisp white coating that would soon freeze and turn to ice.  Two men were stood outside in it; one was smoking and the other was shivering.  Small talk passed between them in staccato snippets until the cigarette was finished and they walked back inside together.

 They had been stood outside a warehouse under an industrial floodlight.  A hundred metres away a chain-link fence prevented casual entry and fifty metres closer there was a sentry-box with a night-watchman inside.  The night-watchman was one of the new class-80 Deterrents, shaped like a mechanical spider and about the size of a Bentley.  It hummed softly to itself as it took in input from cameras located across the compound as well as temperature and motion sensors.  Everything was quiet; nothing was stirring, not even a mouse.  Which was the only reason the Deterrent wasn’t patrolling.

Wilson closed the security door behind him, hearing the click of its lock engaging.  A moment later and there was a second click as the locks in the steel doorframe engaged as well.  He shivered, again, but not from the bitter arctic cold this time; rather he felt these rooms were death-traps.  They were as secure as they could be, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that if a fire broke out he’d be cooked alive before he could get the damn doors to open.  He woke up sometimes from dreams that the power had gone out and he’d been suffocating in darkness in this very room, his fingernails clawing pathetically at the door.  Before his feelings could start turning into claustrophobia Wilson started talking.

“They call her the Iron Womb,” he said.  He liked starting with the most interesting piece of information he had, regardless of how confused that left his audience.

“Who and who?” asked Stefan.  The room was a secure meeting room and had a narrow table with four chair clustered at one end of it.  At the other end, where the two men were stood, was a whiteboard and a flipchart.  Neither had any pens, and the whiteboard was smeared with colour from ineffectual erasure.

“Clara,” said Wilson.  “You met her this morning.”

“You mean… Lady Abel?” Stefan frowned.  “She seemed, well, elderly, to be blunt.  I’m not ageist, you understand, but I would be surprised if she was still capab— if she was still in her, uh, childbearing years.”

“Lady Abel, codename Clara,” said Wilson.  “That’s her.  She’s the official mother of all eight of the night-watchmen.”

Stefan’s frown only deepened as he tried to guess what Wilson was leading up to.  “She didn’t give birth to a Deterrent,” he said.  “Not unless she’s like a Tardis.”

“A what?”

Stefan scrutinised Wilson’s face to see if he was being serious or not.  He was sure that Wilson was old enough to have seen some of the earliest Doctor Whos, but then Wilson seemed to have odd holes in his memories of pop culture.  Almost like he’d had to learn it from a book, which was weird in itself.  “Bigger on the inside than the outside,” he said at last, deciding he didn’t want to get sidetracked.

“Not that I’m aware of,” said Wilson.  His lack of humour seemed almost mechanical at times.  “She did produce all eight of the brains though.”

Stefan stopped thinking and just stared.  “That can’t be right,” he said.  “The Deterrents are entirely synthetic.  They don’t have brains, they have computer cores.  Very expensive computer cores.  That the dev teams program at an exorbitant cost.  That keeps going up, might I remind you?”

“You don’t need to,” said Wilson. “But let me ask you: does it make sense to you that it keeps costing more to write programmes for the same system?  Shouldn’t it get cheaper and faster over time as libraries are built up and knowledge is shared?”

“Turnover on the teams—“ started Stefan and stopped.  Wilson’s smile was only just short of gloating.  “They don’t turn over that much,” he said, reaching the conclusion himself.  “So there should be economies of scale and reuse.”

“Right,” said Wilson.  “There should.  But there aren’t, because there is wetware in there.  Human-ish brains.  Birthed by the Iron Womb.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

Wilson smirked. “Because I’m handing the project over to you.”

“You don’t work on it!”

“True.  Because I’m the primary stakeholder.  You wanted a promotion, Stefan, and this is it.  You’re getting to run the Deterrent teams and you’ll be reporting directly in to me.”

Stefan walked over to a chair and pulled it out from the table and sat down.  “This is a lot to take in,” he said.  “Those teams are trouble.  This seems like a anti-promotion.”

“They’re less trouble than you’ve been led to believe,” said Wilson.  He produced a whiteboard marker from a pocket and started writing on the whiteboard.  “We mislead lower levels of the organisation about certain budgets and teams in order to make specific projects undesirable.  The Q3 figures that you’ll remember….”  As he worked through calculations and timelines and the scale of the deception became clear to Stefan he found himself leaning forward on the table, avidly asking for more information.  The briefing took nearly two hours, at the end of which Stefan was sure that he was in for a work of trouble if anything went wrong, but that there were a lot of safeguards in place to make sure that didn’t happen.

“One last thing,” said Wilson.  “The Iron Womb will be birthing a new brain in January.  Your priority needs to be having a home ready for it.”

“A new Deterrent?”

“Not precisely new,” said Wilson.  “We’ve been working on it since March.  But you need to deliver it ready-to-go before the Iron Womb delivers her side of the deal.”

Kin

 The newspapers filled their front pages with the story: the charismatic, smooth-faced boy-band singer was going into the military and would be serving 24 months somewhere near, but not on, the front-lines.  There wasn't much war going on at the moment anyway but still his fans were despairing over the possibility that there might be an escalation and he might come somewhere near danger.  They gave interviews, sobbed on live TV, blogged incessantly and produced YouTube videos (though given the number of adverts that YouTube shoehorned into each 30 seconds of video the casual viewer would be hard put to know what they'd just watched, or why they'd just watched it).

"This is amazing," said Keith McMahon.  He leaned back in the old, cushioned chair and it tilted, then tipped him out.  He sprawled on the floor like a spavined donkey for a moment, then heaved himself laboriously to his feet.  By the time he was there he was red-faced and gasping for breath.

"Are you ok, Keith?" asked Larry, his assistant.  Larry was barely twenty and looked like he'd collapse under the weight of his clothes if they got wet.  "You shouldn't get out of breath just getting up off the floor, you know."

"COVID," muttered Keith.  "Had it last year, remember?"

"Yeah," said Larry.  "You gave it to all the rest of us.  Remember?"

Keith waved a hairy-knuckled hand as though it didn't matter.  "Yeah," he said.  "Sharing is caring, right?  You seen this though?"  He picked the newspaper up from behind the fallen chair and righted the chair at the same time.  His breath seemed to come a little harder still.

"What, the paper?  Never read it boss.  I've got the internet tubes, ain't I?"

"Issit?" said Keith.  "Poxy computers, they make the screens too hard to read.  This, right, this is real news."  He shook the paper and a couple of the centre pages got free and fluttered to the floor again.

"Right boss," said Larry.  "What's it say then?"

"About Kin," said Keith.  Kin was the lead singer of the boy band.  Most of his fans -- and his 20,000 strong fan club -- believed he was South Korean, but Kin was actually short for Anakin and a bit of an in-joke amongst Keith and his friends.

"What about him?  I thought we were turning him off?"

Keith roared with laughter, which cut off and abruptly turned into a violent coughing fit.  A spray of droplets shot from his mouth and Larry beat a hasty retreat across the studio, putting a mixing desk between himself and Keith.  When he'd got the coughing under control, and stood upright again, Keith put a hand on his stomach -- rather larger than he was really happy about -- and held the paper up. "Yeah," he said.  "We're turning him off, but the management put out a story that he's joining the army for a couple of years."

Larry picked up an iPad and started tapping on the screen, searching for the news.

"They don't know he's an AI?" he said.  "I thought they were all told three years ago after the accident?"

"Management wanted to see how well the AI performed first," said Keith.  "They said they'd put the generated version of him up, with the chatbot behind it for interviews, and see how it went over.  They never saw a need to tell anyone that Kin wasn't real any more."

"So what happened to the real guy?"

"I think they paid for him to go on holiday to Malaysia and he never came back," said Keith.  "Didn't ask.  Weren't none of my business, like."

Slice of life

 “This isn’t working,” said Ernest.  He was sitting on the edge of the sofa with an old blanket over his knees staring avidly at his phone.  Outside winter had brought the darkness in already even though it wasn’t yet five o’clock and so the room was mostly illuminated by the light reflected off Ernest’s face.

“What’s not?” asked Barry, his flatmate.  Barry had just arrived home from work and was taking his coat off in the hallway, hanging on a peg, and then taking his shoes off to leave on the doormat.  Barry liked things neat and tidy at all times.

“This relationship,” said Ernest.  He sighed heavily and put the phone down.  “Turn the lights on, will you?  I can’t see anything in here.”

Barry came in to the living room and turned the lights on.  A single 100W bulb without a shade illuminated the room starkly.  The carpet was beige and stained; the coffee table was orange and sticky with something that wouldn’t scrub off; the couch looked like it had been used as a dog-bed for years.  The darkness had been better.

“With Jamela?” he asked.  “Or did you change her already?”

“Hey hey!” Ernest stood up, the blanket falling to the floor and revealing he wasn’t wearing trousers.  His pale, unmuscled legs looked flabby and dead in the light, and his underpants were wrinkled and worn.  “I’m not that bad!”

“You dated Shirley for three days before deciding she wasn’t good enough for you,” said Barry.  He was of the opinion, privately held, that everyone who’d dated Ernest that he knew about was too good for him.  He was saving money to move out and live by himself and nearly there, and there was nothing about Ernest that was making him regret this choice.  Ernest, as though to reinforce this, belched.

“She was a minger,” said Ernest, which was a reflexive reaction to anything that he didn’t like.  He paused, thinking about it.  “Well, she wasn’t that bad,” he conceded to himself.  “I sort of liked her, but she kept wanting to split the bill.”

“And you wanted her to pay all of it,” said Barry.  He left the living room and went into the kitchen.  The fridge was mostly full, so Ernest couldn’t have been up for too long so far today.  The left-over pasta from last night was there, in its pan, and Barry stirred it thoughtfully.  It would do.

“Well, I’m not working, am I?”  That was a familiar whine.  Barry took the pan of pasta out and poured a little milk into it.  Closing up the fridge he set the pan on the stove and turned the heat on.

“You stopped working last year,” said Barry.  “You said you’d had enough and you needed to find what you loved doing.”

“Yeah!”

“Which seems to be sitting around the flat all day mooching off your latest date from that app.”

“Yea— no!”

“And complaining that no-one wants to pay you to do that.”

“Whose side are you on anyway, mate?”  Ernest’s head appeared around the doorframe.  He sneered at the pan of pasta.  “I was going to have that.”

“Lucky I got here before you then,” said Barry.  He stirred the pan, mixing the milk in as the cheese sauce started to melt.  “It’s my pasta, you should eat your own food.”

“Everything in that fridge is yours.”

“True.  Doesn’t stop you though, does it?  Anyway, what’s wrong with Jamela then?  She seen through you already?”

“I don’t know what you bloody mean,” said Ernest morosely.  “Can we share the pasta, mate?”

“No,” said Barry.  “I’ve got a squash game at eight and I’m not messing around trying to keep you happy tonight.  Make your own food, or buy it, I don’t care.”

“Might get a pizza then,” said Ernest.  He disappeared, but a moment later his voice floated back through the doorway.  “You want pizza too, mate?”

“I’ve got pasta,” said Barry patiently.

“Oh yeah, I forgot.”

Barry stirred the pan again, which was starting to bubble now, and decided to make one last try on Jamela’s behalf.  “What’s wrong with Jamela then?”

“She’s not bloody here, is she?”

“So?”

“So I only dated her because I want someone to warm the bed,” said Ernest.  “Yeah, is that Malt Street pizza please?  I want to order a large pepperoni.”

“Warm the bed?” said Barry, half under his breath.  “What the hell?”

After a rancorous exchange with the pizza shop Ernest hung the phone up.  “Yeah, she’s fine and that, but really I was just cold and needed someone in the bed with me, but she’s acting like she’s entitled to see me now when she feels like it.”

Barry tipped the pasta out on to a plate.  “And that’s bad?”

“Yeah mate.  She’s not keeping the bed warm and she expects me to go out and see her.  In places.”

“You could just get a hot water bottle,” said Barry sighing to himself.  “That’ll keep the bed warm.”

“You got a tenner for the pizza, mate?”

“No,” said Barry with feeling.  “No I bloody haven’t.”

Strike!

 The Minister stepped out off the front steps of the white-stone-clad administrative building and dodged a couple of hurled eggs expertly.  A black-clad assistant held the door to an expensive, sleek grey car open and the Minister slipped inside with practiced ease.  As the door closed another egg shattered against the window and the assistant took out a cloth and wiped it away, taking care to erase all the smears as well.

"What was that about?" asked the woman who was already in the car.  She was dressed smartly but in an old-fashioned way, as though she was depending on her clothes for warmth even indoors, and smelled of cats and mould.  The Minister smiled and chose to discreetly breathe through his mouth.

"Protestors," he said.  "We allow a few through at any given time so long as they're mostly harmless.  If they're carrying actual weapons they're usually stopped."

"Usually?"  The woman arched an eyebrow and a faint frostfall of powder fell from her face.

"If the weapon is clearly archaic or defunct we let them through for fun," said the Minister.  "The papers love it and it makes the protestors feel like they're outsmarting us."

"I see," said the woman.  The car moved smoothly off, pulling into the traffic and quickly becoming just another element of the flow. "Do we want to encourage them?"

"Yes," said the Minister.  "If they have these outlets then they don't start looking for others.  They won't start bombing places, or trying to get hold of guns and being... well, American about things."

"Your prejudices are showing," said the woman.  She smiled and there was another frostfall of white powder.  "Where are we going today?"

"First stop is the Trade Union," said the Minister.  "They have a building -- grotty thing, brutalist architecture as you might imagine, sat right next to a much more elegant hotel.  We have a couple of agents in the hotel, naturally, as despite their socialist rhetoric they like to put their visitors and officials up in it.  And it's not cheap either."

"You?  Concerned about cheap?"

"Well, only inasmuch as I don't like it when people who claim I have too much money start spending it like water and pretending there's a difference."

The woman smiled again. "You're starting to sound like you might have a conscience budding there," she said.  "Do keep an eye on it, won't you?"

The Minister stifled a laugh.

"So you're going to negotiate with them?"

"No," he said.  "We're going to pretend to negotiate with them and encourage them to strike harder.  And as soon as they do, we'll release the details of the package they've turned down and make them look like petty gougers and con-men."

"Will that end the strikes?"

"I doubt it.  But it will damage their grass-roots support, and this is a long-term strategy to get rid of the unions for good."

The woman looked out of the window.  "Over winter?  People are freezing."

"Survival of the fittest, my dear.  After winter only those people who can tolerate hardship adequately will be left.  The country is improving its breeding stock."

Caludium

 He looked at the great hall, looking at it through the eyes of a child.

The child in question was long since dead.  They had been taken from a political dissident and put into school to re-educate them.  After four months it had become apparent that the child was either too stubborn or too stupid to learn what they were being taught so the Overseer had had them brought to the offices of the Surgeon and they had removed the child's eyes.  They apparently had a special spoon for the job -- Caludium didn't doubt it, as he'd seen the Surgeon's operating theatre a couple of times and always walked out hoping he'd never, ever need to go there for anything serious -- and it hadn't taken very long at all.  The Overseer pronounced himself happy and the child had died of 'complications' a couple of days later.  Caludium, who was still debating with himself whether or not he should shut the school down and have the administrators shot, had ordered that the child be buried in the Martyr's grave.  No name could be found, according to the Overseer.  Caludium believed that the Overseer was a congenital liar and a sadist to boot but short of having him tortured could see no way of extracting the name from him.  And if he tortured the man just to find a name out, wasn't he stooping to his level?  The eyes of the child, set into a strange, silvery frame made from rare-earth metals and ingraved with sigils from the Second Kingdom, were presented to him a day later.

Through the eyes of a child the hall looked... curious. The walls were all closer in that Caludium knew they were.  When the hall was empty he'd put the Eyes on and walked around, his hands outstretched.  The Eyes definitely lied about where the walls where.  But where there were empty spaces in the hall, the Eyes found things to look at: here there was a swirl of colour that looked warm and inviting, and there there was an old man sitting crouched on the floor, hunched over on himself, vomiting.  Next to the group of honorable Elders, three women with no good word to say about anyone, a sprite of some kind cavorted, pulling faces and running its hand lasciviously over its body and Caludium felt that it was an appropriate expression of the general attitude of the honorable Elders.  All around the hall there were more of the same: a general appearance that all was not well at all with the Kingdom.

And the Eyes... didn't lie about these strange things.  Caludium had pushed him hands into a vortex of colour and felt the warmth, the slick ooziness; when he'd pulled his hands out they had dripped.  He had stepped in the vomit of the hunched over man and heard the squelch as he walked around the hall.  He had refused to touch the capering sprite, but he had petted, for a moment, a two-headed bird with eyes like flame, and felt hot feathers tickle his fingers.

He took the eyes off and sat down on the only chair in the room: the throne of the Seventh Kingdom.  Almost immediately a hush fell over the room and he realised that he'd inadvertently moved the proceedings on.  Now it was time for the requests to begin, and he would have to choose which ones to grant and which to ignore.

"Sire," said a gelatinous voice off to his side, and he struggled not to cringe as he turned his head to look at the Overseer.

Christmas on a budget

 My editor had announced that we had a budget for Christmas as she flounced into the office wearing a green dress with ruffles that -- I hope -- was supposed to make her look like a Christmas tree.  The brown leggings certainly contributed to the effect by making her seem like she had a knobbly, bulbous trunk, but overall it all seemed a bit try-hard and while I found it more to be pitied than laughed-at, there were certainly smirks around the office after she left.

"You mean for the Christmas party?" I said.  Being the food-and-drink correspondent I was probably the only person who was actively hating the Christmas party.  Not only was I obliged to attend, but I would be working as the paper required me to review the party and would publish the article.  I'd tried, one year, reviewing it accurately and had been bullied into coming into the office on Boxing Day to rewrite it until I "got it right" so I was resigned to my fate.

"No, for the whole of Christmas," she chirruped like a budgie that's got into its owner's meth supply.

"That dress better not be part of it!" came a sharp-toned comment from somewhere deep in the office.  I stared at my desk and pretended that I'd not seen who said it while my editor glared menacingly around the room.

"We can increase the budget if we let someone go," she said.  "Though that would be a shame, just before Christmas.  And this dress, for those of you taking such an interest, is for the charity auction this afternoon."

"We'll be sorry to see you go," I said sincerely.  She was still hunting for her earlier critic and missed my implication.

"In fact," she said, her scowl relaxing as she gave up on hunting insultors, "we are going to have a theme week" -- everyone groaned in unison -- "of Christmas on a Budget this year.  We're going to run a series of articles on regifting, handmaking gifts from things you might otherwise throw out, cutting down on gift lists without offending people, and Christmas dinner on a budget!"  She ended triumphantly and smiled at me.  I frowned back.

"You want me to write recipes?" I asked.  I'd tried once; the Blonde had agreed to take notes and by the time we'd finished trying to make scones we had three empty bottles of London-sourced gin and a recipe that began (and ended) "Take a bottle of gin."  We might have eaten a block of butter, too.

"No," she said.  "But there are several greasy-spoons that are offering a budget Christmas lunch that you should review.  I've emailed you the details."

I hesitated.  This was much more my remit than writing recipes, but I've pretty much reviewed exactly one not-high-end restaurant in my life, and it didn't go well.  Comparing it with L'Escargot and The Fat Duck was, in hind-sight, not a good choice, but even so my observation that the food I'd been served was normally what I'd expect the protein I usually received to have been fed on was both accurate and unflattering.

"Theme week," sang my editor, and flounced into her office.

I opened my email, ignoring the swell of conversation about how flammable my editor's dress looked, and viewed the list she'd sent me with interest.  Even though it seemed faintly wrong, the idea of turning a full English Breakfast into a substitute Christmas lunch had a certain je ne sais quoi about it and the first 'menu' that suggested that bubble-and-squeak was a perfect replacement for brussels sprouts fried in bacon fat wasn't that outlandish.  I wrote the address down and noted that it closed before I'd normally start getting dressed for dinner.  Maybe it woudl have to be lunch after all.

There was no way I could think of that I'd get the Blonde to accompany me on this though.