The Light Brigade

by Kameron Hurley

I didn’t like people telling me what I could do. Ironic, then, signing up for the goddamn military.

And I was. On the right side, I mean. Nobody ever thinks they chose the wrong side. We all think we’re made of light.

You are a bag of human excrement. No one likes you, let alone loves you. In great shape? It’s not enough. Smart? That’s worse. Nothing is ever good enough for the Corporate Corps. They want blind obedience. After a week of that, you’re hungry for anything. Hungry for a “That’s right,” or a “Good job.” You want love, acceptance. Humans want connection.

That’s how they teach you to kill. You might be surprised, but it turns out most people don’t want to kill anybody. We aren’t born murderers. You want to gouge out the eyes of a stranger? You tried it? How did that go? Hardly anybody does that shit. If they do, it’s in a fit of rage or madness. But cold, calculated killing? Only one percent of people are psychopaths. The rest of us have to learn.

They saved the praise for the killing. We met our weapons in week two.

“I like eyes that smile, gestures that apologize, touches that can talk, and silences that declare themselves.”

Immersive experiences are pretty fucking immersive. I’m going to say: They should have sent us all to a shrink, after. But they didn’t. Not yet. We kept going. We kept going. Because that’s what war is. You keep going until it’s over. Or you’re dead.

He put his hand over mine and met my look. “You accept reality. This reality. That will keep you safe for now, my little mouse. But promise me that when you come of age you’ll ask questions. Promise me you’ll strive for some other future than the one we gave you.”

Dawn came over me like a hangover.

You can do a lot more than you think you can. That’s what mandatory training is about. Seeing how far they can push you. How far you can push yourself.

I hadn’t seen propaganda billboards outside Tene-Silvia. I didn’t know you just say the same shit about whatever new enemy you’ve got. All I knew was what I was told. Every enemy shoots babies in their beds. It’s kind of amazing.

“What’s the difference between a communist and a socialist?” Jawbone said. We waited, thinking there was a punch line. “You serious?” Jones said. “Sure. I mean, I know they’re bad, but people use the names the same.”

The air was hot and dry; felt like you could set a tree on fire just by gritting your teeth.

The Bene Gesserit. He was a funny kid, quoted a lot of Herbert. You know Frank Herbert? The litany against fear? I always found the litany more helpful than any meditation.

Did you know those who are mildly depressed see the world more accurately? Yet they don’t live as long as optimists. Aren’t as successful. It turns out that being able to perceive actual reality has very little long-term benefit. It’s those who believe in something larger than themselves who thrive. We all seem to need a little bit of delusion to function in the world.

But after you lose people—you don’t want more people.

Is she awake?

Ohhhhh, is Dietz a woman?

They won that war, is all I’m saying. They started losing when they forgot how to be decent. People will fight for the idea of decency. They will fight for someone who treats them like people. They fight for beliefs far longer and harder than out of fear.

She said there’s this thing called escalation of commitment. That once people have invested a certain amount of time in a project, they won’t quit, even if it’s no longer a good deal. Even if they’re losing. War is like that. No one wants to admit they’re losing. To end a war, you have to give them some way to save face, to pretend the sacrifice was worth it.

Reality is a constructed thing. Imagine us all standing in a circle, trying to describe an object to one another, and as we agree on its characteristics, the thing at the center of our circle begins to take form. That’s how we create reality. We agree on its rules. Its shape. Different cultures have created different realities just by all agreeing about the thing they described.

What I learned, as I looked back on those times, was that the lies are what sustained us. The lies kept us going. Gave us hope. Without lies we have to face the truth long before we are ready for it. Long before we are prepared to fight it.

Not until I hear it from Tene-Silvia’s chief executive of war.”

War was all about the annihilation of truth. Every good dictator and CEO knows that.

That’s the trouble with regimes that get too cruel. People need to feel like they have free will. They want to believe that nobody else is as free or happy as they are. If they aren’t citizens yet, well, shit, that’s their fault. They aren’t working hard enough. People disappear in the night, and you think, of course they must have done something wrong. Good people are rewarded. Bad people are punished.

But it turns out most of us don’t want truth. We want stories that back up our existing beliefs. Flood the world enough with information, and I will pick out only those bits that uphold the virtue and rightness of whatever corp I’ve been taught to love.

There is no bloodless revolution, only necessary revolution, when a system becomes so deeply broken you can’t affect change from the inside.

Any human power can be changed by human beings. That is a truth, a constant. Humans can’t build power structures that cannot be destroyed. We are the power structure.

People should not be afraid of the corporations. Corporations should be afraid of the people. I: You’re a communist then. S: Let’s say I’m old enough not to be dazzled by Ayn Rand.

“You have to make yourself, little cabbage.”

I knew the enemy was not a tone or a texture, but a system.

What if there was a war and nobody came? What if the corp voted for a war and nobody fought it?

Why did we make all this possible? Why didn’t we just go home and take care of our fucking dogs and tell the corps to fuck themselves?

“All the claims you make follow a logical path,” I said. “It’s ‘I won’t, I can’t,’ but you have to make it to ‘I will. I will. I do.’ It’s powerful. That’s the power of volition. That’s the power we can tap into when we jump. When we become the light. What directs us, always, is volition.”

People can always be convinced to turn on one another. All you have to do is convince them that their way of life is being attacked. Denounce all the pacifist liberal bleeding hearts and feel-good heretics, the social outcasts, the educated. Call them elites and snobs. Say they’re out of touch with real patriots. Call these rabble-rousers terrorists. Say their very existence weakens the state. In the end, the government need not do anything to silence dissent. Their neighbors will do it for them.

It’s a rotten choice soldiers are given. Kill your enemy to save yourself, save your friends, and commit murder. But don’t pull that trigger and you might die, your friends might die . . . you may even lose the war, because of that choice. But it’s a soldier’s choice. It’s the same argument for those who can get pregnant, you know. Now, of course, most of the corps have to give you a license to have kids. But there was an argument, a long time ago, that to continue a pregnancy or not, while a terrible decision, was a decision only the pregnant person could make. It’s that way with soldiers. You have the choice. None of it’s good, but it’s yours.

My team up there is going to outlast you. And me, here? I’m going to checkmate this whole motherfucking time line.”

Maybe when they have a war again, no one will come. Maybe they will be full of light.

The heroes were always the ordinary people who pursued extraordinary change.

“a directed Hamiltonian path through a bipartite graph.”

Don’t just fight the darkness, friends. Let’s be the light.