The Chaos Principle by Nathan Johnson

Author:Nathan Johnson [Johnson, Nathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2021-09-29T23:00:00+00:00

23

A Forgotten War

“She knows we’re coming, Jan.”

It had been difficult to assemble 450,000 bodies in secrecy. They’d been gathering in smaller groups for months, flocking like sly migrant birds towards the basin. Each of the adherents had sworn to network silence, living as if detached members of a simpler generation. But collective minds were porous, and perfect fidelity was unrealistic. There was a general unease among the still-wired opposition that something significant might occur. Rumors had circulated.

The assembled fleet of transports was also an indicator that something was brewing in the basin. Most of them were over fifty years old—bulky and curious relics misplaced in the future.

“I doubt she thinks we’re here for a classic car show,” Jan had answered.

It had been challenging to assemble reliable equipment that would still function at all after they severed the network umbilical. Everything had seemed to rely to some degree on an uplink to work—military-grade weaponry, the transports, even modern household appliances were to some degree infected by the Bug.

Information that streamed from complex data centers had replaced some of the equipment’s redundant onboard processors. The real souls of the machines existed remotely now. Exponential increases in transmission speed and reliability had facilitated this new technological economy. And one couldn’t embark on a great act of extermination if the insect controlled the exterminators.

As Jan had often reminded anyone who would listen, bullets and conventional explosives still had minds of their own.

She had smiled at the sturdy forward Commander and looked out at the quiet, sleeping horde pooled together under green makeshift tents in the far-flung basin.

Of course, she knew they were coming. Did it matter now? They had assembled an army from the mechanical ghosts of the past. Jan was coordinating a modern medieval takeover.

“We might as well have swords,” she had said while swirling a cup of pot-brewed coffee.

But Jan had known that the sheer numbers of the antiquated force were her greatest weapons. They had but to arrive at once and create enough confusion for one of them to be successful. It had been a grand, chaotic strategy worthy of prophetic conflict. The basement would burn at a hundred million degrees, and the rest of the world could sweep the ashes.

“And he gathered them together into a place called in the Hebrew tongue Armageddon,” she had said dramatically, quoting one of her father’s favorite books and sweeping her arm across the flat expanse.

But their enemies hadn’t gathered an army of kings to destroy them in the basin. Her army had been quietly marching towards them instead.

The sleeping soldiers were an underrepresentation of a worldwide movement that had been ready to fight against what they perceived as a globally destabilizing threat. Jan had an early choice; coordinating with a list of enthusiastic foreign governments and starting a fully-telegraphed world war, or moving like localized assassins to strike with precision, enjoying the benefit of relative surprise. Her choices were size or surprise, treason or arguably justified patriotic correction.

It had not been possible for outside forces to move undetected past the nation’s immaculately secured borders.

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