Selected Short Stories Featuring Cry Wolf Read online

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  Don’t get me wrong- I’m not a bleeding heart blue helmet, but I’m no xenophobic stars and bars lover, either. The UN and the ICC are a natural extension of the idea of Federalism, which I support. But, like Federalism, it’s important for Internationalism to cede most control to countries just as the Feds cede control to the States, which on most days, the UN does just fine.

  This is the Hague. Some things ought to be sacred. But here I am, rolling plastique around detcord in the shape of a door, because this is where our information puts him, and thermal imaging confirms there’s somebody detained here. If it ends up being one of those Ugandan pricks, we can always just tranq 'em, throw him in the recovery position and try again some other day.

  What’s funny is Congress passed a law says we’ll come get our boys if you take them, and the one thing they outlawed in that operation was bribery. Least violent and offensive tactic, at least under the panacea of “all means necessary and appropriate.” Of course, if my boys were ever caught out Congress could always plausibly deny that our means were appropriate, regardless of the means we chose to use.

  I guess I just wish this were a journalist, someone detained for telling the truth, or an ambassador spoke out too loudly for some tin pot to endure. On most days, I like double jeopardy- that it keeps me only facing one trial for the bad things I do for my country- but that’s the line I draw. The things I do for my country, well, I figure the least they could do is what they can to see I rot in a prison back at home. But this boy, things he did weren’t for America; only one seeing any benefit from what he did was him- certainly not any of those girls.

  If he were any other idiot, he’d have been burnt by court-martial, but his step daddy was a Colonel somewhere, pulled strings to get the case fast-tracked and into an Iraqi court through the new Status of Forces Agreement. You can afford to bribe a jury in Iraq on a soldier’s pay. Army and the Feds were happy to have the excuse not to retry him publicly, just to get him the hell out of the headlines, even if nobody liked what he’d got up to. That’s when the International Criminal Court stepped in, very reluctantly, because of the situation. You could say much the same for us, now.

  And I know I’m not the only one with trepidation; Mullins has been antsy since we got clearance, said we’d be better off just sniping the SOB and blaming it on Al Qaeda. Asshole gone, conflict solved, and we get one get-out-of-jail-free card on a terrorist target anywhere in the world. That’s why I asked him if he was sure he was only using enough C4 to open the wall, and that I’d leave his ass in that cell if the explosion killed somebody. His eyes flashed mean a moment, before he responded, “Sir.”

  The wall came tumbling down, kicking up dust and dirt. The kid was on his knees, coughing, trying to retch. You been at this long enough, you know where to kick someone to keep them from vomiting, and I didn’t want him getting my boots dirty. He blinked at me stupidly when I told him to get up. I bent in half to speak at him. “You’re a disgrace to every man and woman who serves in this Army, every man and woman who served beside you as peacekeepers, and worse, you’re an affront to every American- you put each and every one of the people you were swore to protect into the firing line you were supposed to be occupying because you couldn’t keep your mind to your duty and your pecker in your pants. On your feet.”

  I leaned in close, and my voice went low the way it does when I’m explaining to my Chessie just whose bed it is, but it stayed loud enough the others heard. “I may not have the pull to see you prosecuted, but I’ll put my career to it that I’ll have you discharged so dishonorably that even Blackwater won’t give you a second glance. And if I ever run into you in the world, and I have even a moment without eyes on me, I’ll put you down like the diseased mongrel you are. Now, march, boy, before you go from by bad my worse side.”

  I’d refused, from the brief to now, to refer to him as a soldier. Does damage to my soldiers, humanizes him at their cost. He stumbles, with his head down, face pinched like the world’s been picking on him. He’s no soldier, just someone’s sniveling brat. No decency. No honor. And no goddamn sense of duty.

  Table of Contents

  Ancestral Memory

  I could tell it was going to be one of those conversations. Jerry and I had a few, back in college, when he was an insane and insanely brilliant grad-student, and I was a business major looking for an excuse to drop out to become a professional dope-fiend.

  It was how we met, over a bowl. Pot always made Jerry excitable, intellectually and otherwise, and some of his best ideas came from that manic energy- some of our most profitable business ventures had. So when he called me long after the building closed I didn't ask any of the questions you normally would, I humored him.

  When he passed me a bong large enough that the resin deposits inside it probably would have qualified him for an intent to distribute charge, I shrugged.

  He exhaled, and he wasn't a scientist whose brains was worth millions of dollars, he was a college kid inventing new kinds of microscopy to examine his belly button.

  “I know how it sounds, okay, but think about it- the human body is the perfect storage medium- like a computer hard drive, only slightly more complex. Instead of ones and zeros- on or off- binary, it’s called. We operate on a base 4 system, a quaternary, because there are four nucleotide bases that store genetic information in our DNA. But the reason we’re better than optical or magnetic storage is there’s no degradation- in fact, we’re constantly renewing. Information in human DNA is kept pristine for 80 years barring catastrophe.”

  I was intrigued, I’ll admit, but I’d known Jerry long enough to take his flights with particularly strong salt. “Okay,” I said. “Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that I believe you, that we really are just walking memory sticks. What information are we even storing?”

  “I… I don’t know. Here’s the thing. I mean, if you took the contents of your hard drive at home, a lot of porn, I’d assume, and converted it from base 2 to base 4, then coded that onto DNA and put it into a situation where it could self-replicate- I mean, I have no idea what kind of an animal that might turn into. Probably, I mean, mathematically, it would be totally nonviable; I mean, what are the odds that your computer’s information would also randomly code for an organism? Millions to one, at least. But what I’m getting at is that we don’t even have any conception of what the technology to read our DNA might look like. I guess you could try and input it into a quaternary based computer and just assume they stacked linearly according to their order within chromosomes. However, since the numbering of chromosomes seems random, that gives us the problem of ordering. To get the number of different orders just the 23 chromosomes could possibly give, putting aside for a moment the very distinct possibility that all 25,000 genes could be at play, we have a factorial of 22 different possible solutions- you know, 22 times 21 times 20- which is like a quintillion.”

  I really did hate when he’d get all mathy on me; nobody liked to be this far out of their depth. “Is that even a real word, or is that your way of telling me it’s unimaginably huge, like googolplex?”

  “Googolplex is real, too, but yeah, it’s like… 10 to the 18th power, or like a million million million, or a billion squared. The U.S. national debt is like 10 trillion, so if there were ten thousand countries all with the same 10 trillion dollar debt, then our global debt would be, roughly, a quintillion.”

  “Would you and your calculator like a minute alone?”

  “This is exciting, you horse’s ass. This could be God’s own notation, stored in our very DNA. But, there is a problem. Even assuming we overcame the mathematical quandary, which, while large, is really a matter of buying enough computers with enough capacity, we don’t know what the output is going to look like. It would be written in a language unlike anything we’ve ever encountered, and even beyond the language itself, it’s likely to be coded, like how html is different from spoken English- all barriers and hurdles, but with enough man-power, ingenuity, time a
nd, admittedly, cash-flow, it’s all inevitably solvable.”

  “But that isn’t the best part. The fact that our DNA is base 4 raises some exciting possibilities- namely that base 4 is really only ever applied to calculations of the Hilbert curve. The Hilbert curve is especially useful for creating three dimensional databases. What this means, in a nutshell, is it’s going to be something. We aren’t just going to decode the thing and get 'drink Ovaltine.' Whatever this codes, it’s going to have form and substance, as well as information. It could be a unified field theory. It could be a record of the universe. It could be a mathematical equation explaining life. It could articulate a perpetual motion machine for creating free energy and eliminating want. It could be blueprints for a dimensional gate that would grant access into Heaven, or a recipe for the world’s most orgasmic cheesecake.”

  “That all sounds a mite heretical.”

  “Acknowledging God might have understood what he was doing when he created physics is heretical talk to most. But math, physics, chemistry, biology- it all works too well, and interacts too perfectly to be nature simply bumbling its way through random mutations and entropy. There’s too much organization to