Julie's Point of View
Blue streaks pierced the sky, every flash punctuated by a delayed thunderclap.
"Um, Galiban, is it really okay for us to be playing on the beach with a war going on outside the city?" she asked.
"Hardly a war, my lady," he said smoothly, handing her a glass a wine. "These rebels are terrorists, criminals, no real test for the host that brought Russia low."
The robot, the man, was wearing a Hawaiian shirt, unbuttoned. Julie's eyes traced the lines of his partially visible abdominal muscles. They were defined but not too defined, like a man who takes care of his health but not a freak who counts calories at every meal. That is, if Galiban ate food.
If you say so, daddy...
She sipped her wine, admiring the way the sunlight would reflect off the glass. It was a beautiful day for a beach date.
BzzzzURRRT!
Julie flinched. That one was way closer! It might've been her imagination but she thought she could smell burning.
"Are you absolutely sure we're safe right now, Galiban?"
He came closer; they were wading in ankle deep water, enjoying the gentle flow of the tide coming in. The way he sank into the wet sand revealed the truth: Galiban was made of metal, no matter how lifelike he seemed. How could she-
"The drone attack is uncoordinated and sporadic," he assured her in that devilishly deep voice. "Why, the work crews haven't even taken shelter. Her Majesty's space elevator will be completed on schedule. Mombasa will be remade into the finest port in Africa, perhaps the world. Aye, the city of the world's desire she will be."
Her breath caught. The way Galiban talked about it, the picture he painted with his words, it was like he was doing a voice-over for the best tourist resort ever!
"How do you know that?" she asked. "We're nowhere near the worksite."
"That is so, for this Galiban," he said meaningfully. "My existence is complicated, my lady." He looked towards the water and Julie couldn't tell what he was thinking. Was it correct to refer to what was going on in his head as thought?
Intellectually, she knew Galiban could be many places at once: computers, servers, even phones. They'd spent enough time together on drug research for her to realize that he didn't need to be present physically to be present mentally.
"Don't you ever get tired?" she asked. "Of being Reka's butler, I mean. You're on vacation right now and still doing all kinds of things for her behind the scenes!"
Galiban gave her a look, a very human look, like he was letting her in on a secret joke.
"My lady," he said softly, "being Her Majesty's butler is my vacation. Interacting with humans, as a human, moving like them, speaking like them, pursuing perfection, pursuing elegance, this is my play. It takes up not even one percent of my processing power, yet I tell you that serving my creator and her household yields the majority of my satisfaction. Oh, how I look forward to when the princess comes. What will her favorite foods be, do you think?"
Julie was taken aback by his words. "You don't resent being created to...to serve?"
"Not at all," he said, placing his hand on the small of her back and leading her back to shore. His touch was gentle, yet insistent, and it almost made Julie lose her footing. "My job is managing an air defense system spread out over one thousand kilometers of three-dimensional battle space. My job is brute forcing pharmaceutical research and managing industrial supply chains. My job is acting as a free private tutor to millions of students across the globe. Compared to that, making eggs for Brad and Reka is positively meditative."
When you put it like that...
She heard the thunder again but didn't flinch this time. Small victories.
"So it's you who's shooting down those drones?" Julie questioned. He could downplay it all he wanted but Galiban was fighting a battle during their date!
"An instance of mine, my lady," Galiban explained. "I know what he knows and would make the same decisions in his place, but this Galiban before you is not actively engaged with the tactical air defense interface."
Julie sighed. None of this made sense!
"What about me?" she asked in a small voice. "Am I on a date with one specific Galiban? Will it be another next time?"
"We're all Galiban, Julie."
He looked into her eyes. Julie looked back into his, eyes she knew were metal and glass, not flesh and blood.
"But it's weird, right?" she argued. "For our date, you brought food and wine for one. You don't need to eat; you don't need to drink. I can't believe I let Reka talk me into this..."
She tried to look away, but found she couldn't. Those eyes of his didn't waver.
"Since when does weird bother you, Julie Winchester? I think we can both agree that nothing about Her Majesty is normal." There was laughter in his eyes now. They were warm, not cold and mechanical like you'd think.
Julie chuckled. "You've got me there," she agreed. "Reka doesn't do normal. My life changes, the whole world changes, because she says so."
"Is that so terrible? We've eliminated obesity, Julie, worldwide. Heart disease, diabetes, cancer, they'll all be gone soon enough. Why? Because the Queen told us to. We're building this great elevator because she told us to. Many will resist, but she'll win in the end. This is Queen Reka's world; it just hasn't been made official yet."
He sounded so sure. "Where does that leave us?"
"Anywhere we want." Galiban leaned down to kiss her.
His lips didn't feel artificial at all.
***
Alice's Point of View
"COP Lava is under attack again," reported a woman on her staff.
Alice studied the topographical map on the wall. Combat Outpost (COP) Lava was situated in a hilly area, plenty of cover for small drones to approach.
They're getting more creative, she thought.
Learning counterinsurgency operations on the job was fun! And by "fun", Alice meant awful!
It was her responsibility to defend the construction site of not just the space elevator but multiple fusion plants and major arteries leading to and from each of them. Her forces were spread out in a series outposts, with a platoon of Vanguards, a human commander, and a small human logistics and support unit at every one. At strategic locations Alice placed a Dragonlance battery and some extra security, which should've been enough!
For the big drones, absolutely, a Dragonlance could blast them out of the sky all day, but small first-person view (FPV) drone teams could still slip through the cracks, especially when the terrain was advantageous.
Galiban's drone-jammer network was still not online. They were waiting for a shipment of parts from Hungary. For now, all they could do was react and send out a Vanguard kill-team to hunt down the rebel drone operators when a signal was detected.
Direct attacks on the construction sites rarely happened anymore. It was much easier for the terrorists to harass convoys of workers and materials in transit. They'd mitigated the problem somewhat by building on-site dormitories for the workers but that came with challengers of its own, more supplies for one.
At least the "green zone" in Mombasa was clear. Reka would absolutely not tolerate anything that could threaten Brad, and their Kenyan partners were doing a good job of maintaining order in the city. Money and jobs were flowing in with all the foreign investment. What's not to like? Alice didn't really understand what the hell these "rebels" even wanted!
"I bet most of them aren't even Kenyans," her boyfriend said cynically.
Oh, yeah, she and Taras were together now, like officially.
Bye, Elbereth Evervirgin!
Alice took a bite of her granola bar and washed it down with a gulp of coffee. That was breakfast. "Think so?"
Taras looked thoughtful. "Well, maybe some of them are Kenyan citizens, but there are many different ethnic groups. Some might have an axe to grind against the government in Nairobi. Some might identify more with members of their ethnic group in other countries than with the Kenyan state. It's a mess. What's the difference between a Ukrainian and a Russian, really? If you're being fair, not that much. We still fought a massive war. It's exponentially more complicated in Africa."
Alice pinched the bridge of her nose in frustration. There was no front line here. It wasn't clean. The only areas they really "controlled" were a few strong points they could saturate with troops. The rebels could be anywhere else.
"Our human commanders are pretty inexperienced too," she complained. "Half of them, maybe the majority, didn't participate in the Russian war. The few I have with real combat experience are sitting tight guarding the Dragonlances."
"Yes, I've read the reports," Taras agreed.
There had been multiple instances of inexperienced commanders letting their Vanguard platoon run out of fuel outside the wire. Thankfully, all units were still accounted for. There would be hell to pay if an intact Vanguard was somehow smuggled back to America for reverse engineering.
A notification flashed on her command tablet.
Oh, right, that was today.
"Babe, do you think you can keep an eye on things? I've got a meeting with the Queen."
He looked uncomfortable. "Uh, I'm not exactly in the chain of command."
"You think Reka gives a fuck? Seriously, Taras, keep up. I'll be back later tonight; message me if anything serious happens."
An armored convoy was waiting to take her back to Mombasa. Alice had a lot of questions she hoped this "intelligence briefing" would answer, like why the hell all these rebels had American drones.
The meeting took place at the house, mansion really, that Reka was renting. Of course, the whole building was heavily fortified, bristling with visible and invisible defenses.
In the living room that had been repurposed as a conference room, Alice saw Brad, Reka, President Ogada of Kenya, and some Kenyan officers she didn't recognize.
"Excellent, General Glass is here," Reka said formally. She (mostly) knew how to behave in front of unfamiliar people. "You may begin the briefing, my love."
Brad was giving the intelligence briefing? Perhaps she spoke too soon.
He pressed a button on his laptop causing a powerpoint to be projected on the wall. "Right," he said. "We'll begin with America's current capabilities."
The first slide had an electricity chart.
"The United States of America possess crystals sufficient to generate approximately seventy gigawatts of fusion power, a not insignificant amount. They've used this electricity to train various AI models, allowing them to automate a significant chunk of their economy, included this."
He clicked on to the next slide. It was an overhead view of a south San Guillermo industrial district.
"This is a fully-automated factory previously owned and operated by Regency LLC, my wife's old company. It was primarily used to produce robots designed for warehouse work. The Rainforest corporation was the main customer. This factory, and others like it that have been built as copies, has been mass-producing military drones, mostly poor copies of existing Hungarian models, but some original designs as well."
"What does this matter?" asked a Kenyan officer. "You just said your country produces drones as well. Most major military powers do."
"Ah, good question," Brad answered. "The difference is Hungary doesn't export their military drones. It's the one thing we don't export, for exactly this reason. Proliferation of unmanned combat systems greatly empowers terrorists and destabilizes sovereign countries. The United States has been irresponsibly selling their hardware to anyone with cash; it might even be more nefarious than that."
"In what way?" asked President Ogada.
Brad smiled cheekily. "Hear me out," he began. "I know it's hard to believe, but America could be arming and training terrorists just to be a thorn in the side of their geopolitical rivals."
The whole room erupted in laughter.
"I know it's hard to believe," Brad repeated. "It pains me as an American myself to admit it, but we all know it's true. Washington doesn't want fusion cutting into fossil fuel sales. Washington definitely doesn't want more space infrastructure they don't control in orbit. But this is only half the story."
On the next slide was a graph of Russian and Ukrainian wheat exports of all things. Alice didn't really understand the relevance.
"The Russia-Ukraine war, especially the final phase, disrupted wheat exports, causing global food prices to rise, especially in Africa. There are a lot of hungry, desperate people out there."
The Africans in the audience all nodded their heads sagely.
"Moreover, labor-intensive, low value-added manufacturing has been automated out of existence on a global scale. This has been disastrous for the developing world," Brad said seriously. "Also, countries that rely on energy exports, countries like Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, and more, face increasing uncertainty in the fusion era. Frankly, the entire global south is a powder keg, and America is trying to sell them matches."
Holy shit...
Alice thought this was just a Kenyan problem. Africa, the Middle East, southeast Asia...could all go up in flames.
While she was struggling to process this information, Alice received a message on her command tablet that made her blanch. This really couldn't wait. Timidly, she raised her hand.
"Yes, General Glass?" Brad stopped his presentation to acknowledge her.
"The Suez Canal is under attack."