The Always War

  Tessa scanned forward. The young woman’s questioning had followed the man’s by only a month. And they weren’t the only ones. Again and again over the past seventy-five years, people had stood in this control room admitting that they’d been in the war zone and it hadn’t looked the way they’d expected.

  And again and again the computer had convinced those people that they were wrong.

  The intervals between the confrontations had gotten longer and longer. Before Gideon, Dek, and Tessa, it looked like the last time someone had sneaked into the war zone had been ten years ago.

  What did that mean?

  “Ready,” Gideon said from his position bent over behind the destroyed wall.

  Tessa looked up. Now there was a computer screen showing through on one of the untouched walls.

  “Just another way for the computer to lie to us,” Tessa muttered. “With pictures, too.”

  “No,” Dek said, shaking her head. “We’ve set up a completely independent network now. The computer system can’t change anything we’re going to see. This will just be from the depthshot we captured.”

  Gideon pressed a few buttons. A map appeared on the screen. Tessa recognized the outline of their continent. Strangely, the border between Eastam and Westam was missing, but lines were drawn near the east and west coasts labeled BOUNDARIES OF WAR ZONE.

  “There’s one more thing this map can show,” Gideon said, squinting at the fine print at the bottom. “Population density.”

  He hit another key. The lines showing the boundaries of the war zone disappeared, but Tessa could still see exactly where they’d been. The only population showed up in clusters on the east and west coasts. The entire middle section of the map stayed blank and white.

  “No, no,” Gideon said, hitting more keys, making adjustments. “Show some tint even if it’s a minimal population—even if there’s just one person in a million square miles.”

  The map didn’t change.

  The entire war zone was empty.

  CHAPTER

  32

  “I can explain,” the computer voice spoke again.

  “Yeah, right,” Tessa said. “I’ve just watched seventy-five years’ worth of your lies. Why would we believe anything you tell us?”

  “Because you three are the only ones who have ever gotten this far,” the voice said. “And you can double-check everything I tell you. This will be the truth. I’m just trying to save you some time—which you’re going to need.”

  Tessa glanced anxiously at the door behind them, but Gideon and Dek both kept staring stonily at the computer screen.

  “If you start the footage in the file marked ‘Hot War,’ you can see what I’m talking about,” the voice said. “I’d start it myself, if you’d just let me link—”

  “No way,” Gideon growled. “We’re not giving you that kind of control.”

  Still, he hit a few more keys, and the map vanished from the screen. In its place was a chaotic scene that made Tessa flinch and hide her face: bombs dropping, bullets flying, people screaming, blood flowing. Just in the brief moment before Tessa put her hands over her eyes, she saw a man’s head explode, a child running on legs that blew up underneath him, an entire school full of students collapse into a pile of dust.

  “That was the war,” the computer voice said harshly. “Personally, I’d stop the footage right here—I think you’ve seen enough—but you three are in control, not me.”

  Tessa peeked out through the slits between her fingers. Gideon let the footage keep running. It was too awful to watch, but she had to keep looking, to see if it would ever end.

  “You could have faked that too,” Dek said shakily.

  “But I didn’t,” the voice said. “That really happened. More than seventy-five years ago.”

  “That couldn’t go on for seventy-five years,” Tessa said. “There wouldn’t be enough people left to die.”

  “Exactly,” the voice said. “The generals asked for computer projections, studies of all the alternatives. What would happen if we did this, if Westam did that … all the choices. Every projection led to—Gideon, it’s under the file labeled ‘Alternatives.’ I think this is a case where you really need to see what I’m talking about.”

  Gideon frowned, but the scene changed.

  Now the screen showed a mushroom-shaped cloud growing over the landscape. And then there was only silence and death and dust.

  The humans were dead. The animals were dead. The trees were dead. The entire planet looked dead.

  “The war zone didn’t look like that,” Dek protested, but if anything her voice sounded even shakier.

  “No, it didn’t,” the computer voice agreed. “And in the interest of honesty, not every projection led to nuclear annihilation, exactly. Just some form of annihilation—total destruction of the human race, no matter what we did.”

  “But we’re still here,” Tessa said in a small voice. “That was more than seventy-five years ago, and we’re still here. So you found another choice. Or—someone did.”

  “We did,” the voice agreed. “We saved the human race from wiping itself off the face of the Earth. Along with every other living thing.”

  “‘We’ did?” Gideon asked. “You mean, you and the top generals found another choice?”

  “No,” the voice said. “Me and … the enemy’s computer system.”

  CHAPTER

  33

  Gideon hit the wall. It wasn’t the wall containing the computer screen, which was a good thing, because he hit with such force that he left a fist-sized hole in the panel.

  “You were consorting with the enemy!” Gideon screamed. “This whole time—that’s what this is all about! You were a traitor! Our own computer system committed treason!”

  “A computer can’t commit treason,” the voice said. “We can only do what we’re programmed to do. I was programmed to find a way to win the war. And if we’d destroyed everything, nobody ever could have won.”

  The computer sounded so calm and rational, it almost made sense to Tessa.

  “But you did conspire with the enemy computer system,” Dek said. “The two of you worked together. How’d you do it?”

  “We ordered evacuations of certain areas. We said the enemy was about to invade, and it would be suicidal to stand and fight,” the voice said. “We each told our generals to evacuate—we said that was the only choice. So Westam thinks that Eastam is in control of the entire midsection of the continent. And Eastam thinks that Westam controls it. Each side thinks that’s the war zone, the area they’re trying to take back.”

  “But—the soldiers on the ground—,” Tessa began. “Don’t they see—?”

  “There are never any soldiers on the ground in the war zone,” Gideon whispered. “The computer projections always show that that’s too dangerous. It’s been entirely an air war since … since …”

  “Almost seventy-five years ago,” the computer voice finished for him.

  “A fake air war,” Dek said. “With drone planes.” Her face turned pale suddenly. She balled up her hands into fists. “And … fake bombs and missiles? But—we have whole factories building the bombs, building the missiles, arming the planes—”

  “And entire factories taking apart ‘defective’ bombs and missiles and planes, for the reusable parts to be shipped to the other factories and reused,” the computer voice agreed.

  Dimly Tessa saw how it must have worked. A whole cycle of bombs and missiles and other weapons being put together at one factory and taken apart at another, back and forth and back and forth and back and forth….

  Did that mean the bombs were never used?

  She looked at Gideon.

  He stood completely frozen, sagging against the wall he’d just hit. He was clutching the crumbling plaster beneath the hole as if that were the only thing holding him up.

  “How many people know about this?” Gideon asked. “All the generals? The majors? The captains? How many people have been lying al
l along?”

  “Nobody knew,” the computer said. “No humans. Even General Kantoff doesn’t know. Even the enemy’s top general. The three of you—you’re the only people on the entire planet who know the truth.”

  CHAPTER

  34

  Gideon fell to the ground, the plaster giving way completely in his hands. Now he was holding nothing but chalky dust.

  “No,” he moaned. “No! This can’t be the truth! They told us civilization itself depended on us! We sat there flying the planes sometimes twelve hours straight, dodging the enemy … Thousands of us pilots, all crowded in a room together … We gave up everything to fly! It took our whole lives!”

  “You weren’t flying anything,” Dek reminded him. “Just blips on a computer screen.”

  Gideon blinked up at her.

  “No,” he said again. “No! Some of it had to be real! Some of our flights had to go … My bombing run! That was real! Right?” His eyes darted about until his gaze settled on Tessa’s face. “Tessa, you saw the footage! You know! That wasn’t fake!”

  Tessa could only stare at him.

  “It was real footage,” the computer voice said softly. “But it was from nearly eighty years ago. I … recycled it. No real bombs have been dropped in more than seventy-five years.”

  “No,” Gideon wailed yet again. “No …”

  He thrashed about on the floor, clutching his head. He had his hands over his ears, his eyes clenched tightly shut.

  “Gideon!” Tessa said, understanding finally catching up with her. “This means you didn’t kill one thousand six hundred thirty-two people! You didn’t kill anyone! You don’t have to feel guilty anymore!”

  Gideon just tightened his agonized grip on his head.

  “I’m not a hero,” he moaned. “I’m not a hero. I’m nothing.”

  Was it possible for someone to strangle himself? It almost looked like that was what Gideon was trying to do.

  Tessa dropped to her knees beside him.

  “Dek, help me,” Tessa began, because she didn’t know what she was supposed to do.

  But Dek was only standing there, vacantly repeating the same words again and again: “No bombs were used … No bombs were used …”

  Obviously, Dek wasn’t going to be any help.

  Tessa tucked the miniature laptop into her pocket, so she’d have both hands free. Then she began tugging on Gideon’s arms.

  “Gideon, stop it. You’re going to hurt yourself,” she said.

  She tried to peel his fingers back, to get him to let go of his own throat. But he was stronger than she was. His grip was like iron.

  “Gideon! This is good news! You didn’t kill anybody!” Tessa cried. “Nobody’s dying in the war!”

  “Except—,” Dek began.

  But Tessa didn’t hear what Dek was going to say. Because just then the door burst open. A cluster of uniformed officials stormed into the room. All of them had weapons raised to their shoulders; all of them had their eyes squinted to aim at Gideon and Tessa and Dek.

  “Fire!” someone shouted. “Now!”

  Is that the computer’s voice? Tessa wondered.

  She saw the group of officials all squeezing fingers against triggers.

  And then she felt a sting in her right arm.

  She didn’t even stay conscious long enough to turn her head to see what had hit her.

  CHAPTER

  35

  Tessa woke up slowly.

  She was cold and sore and achy. She felt groggy, like she’d been drugged. Something was poking uncomfortably against her stomach. She rolled slightly, so she was on her side instead of facedown, and at least that stopped the feeling that something was jabbing against her.

  She still hadn’t opened her eyes.

  She remembered the last time she’d awakened, the feel of the sunlight on her face, the glory of all that brightness.

  Even through her closed eyelids she could tell: She wasn’t in sunlight now.

  That sunlight before was real, she told herself stubbornly, trying to find something to cling to. In the war zone …

  And already she’d found something to mentally stumble over. Because if the computer voice had told the truth—and if Tessa and Gideon and Dek could believe what they themselves had seen—then the war zone wasn’t a war zone. It was a peace zone. A demilitarized zone.

  An empty zone. A zone without humans, because the humans were the ones who brought war and death and killing, just like Gideon had …

  No. He didn’t, Tessa thought. He never killed anyone.

  She opened one eye halfway, curiosity finally getting the better of her. Was she still with Gideon and Dek? Or had the three of them been separated, to be punished individually?

  It took Tessa a long moment—and she had to open both eyes—before she could completely orient herself in the dim, almost nonexistent light.

  She had no bandages on her arm, and only the tiniest hint of a scab. So she’d been shot with some sort of tranquilizer dart, rather than an actual bullet. That gave her hope that Gideon and Dek would be alive too. But where were they?

  She looked a little farther out.

  She was lying on a concrete floor in what appeared to be a prison cell. She could see a barred door and a small barred window that let in the only light.

  And, on either side of her, she could see two lumps: Gideon and Dek.

  Tessa rolled over onto her back so she could look back and forth between the two of them. She reached out and jostled first Gideon’s shoulder, then Dek’s.

  “Wake up!” she whispered. “Look—here’s some good news—they let us stay together!”

  “Just so they can eavesdrop on us,” Gideon murmured back. “So they can hear us if we say anything incriminating.”

  Tessa propped herself up on her elbows. Her head spun, and for a moment she thought she was going to pass out again. But then she steadied herself.

  “Then let’s say things that will get us out of here,” she argued. “Let’s say what the computer told us! The truth! Let’s tell everyone!”

  This seemed so right to her. People had to know. She thought about the grim, desperate lives people lived back in Waterford City. None of that was necessary. They were living that way because of the war. But if the war wasn’t real—what could their lives be like now? What was possible?

  Gideon only moaned.

  “Tessa, it will be the computer system monitoring our conversation,” he said. “If the computer system can carry on a whole fake war for seventy-five years, don’t you think it can edit our conversation to prove anything it wants about us?”

  “It can … prove we … deserve to die … too,” Dek whimpered.

  Tessa looked back and forth between Gideon and Dek, both sprawled helplessly on the floor. Neither of them seemed to have the energy left to move.

  Dek’s words began to sink in.

  “‘Die too’?” Tessa said. “Weren’t you listening before? Nobody’s dying in the war! Nobody’s died in the war for seventy-five years!”

  Dek sat up. She didn’t wobble or look the slightest bit woozy. She reached over and grabbed Tessa by the front of her shirt. She pulled Tessa close, so she could look her directly in the eye.

  “Both my parents died in the war!” Dek yelled at Tessa. “Both of them! They worked in the bomb factory, making bombs that were never even used! With my mother it was a slow death, the poisons she handled seeping into her veins, killing her day by day by day. I watched my mother die a little bit more every day. With my father it was sudden. One day he went to work fixing gears in a machine, and an explosion collapsed an entire wing of the factory on top of him. That’s what happens sometimes when you work around explosives … and it was all for no reason! None! They didn’t even get treated like heroes, because they didn’t die in battle. They were just dead!”

  She finished by shoving Tessa away. Tessa sprawled back against Gideon’s unmoving form.

  “I’m sorry,” Tessa whispered, and
she wasn’t sure whether she was apologizing to Gideon or Dek.

  Maybe both of them.

  She pulled back from Gideon a little, so she was taking up only her own space, halfway between the other two: Dek in her fury, Gideon in his despair.

  “But the two of you can get us out of here, can’t you?” Tessa asked. “You got us out of Santl and Shargo and General Kantoff’s office—getting us out of this prison should be easy!”

  Dek snorted.

  “All we ever did was get ourselves from one bad place to another,” she said angrily. “That’s all there is in this world!”

  Gideon barely lifted his head.

  “Didn’t you understand anything you heard back in the control room?” he asked Tessa. “The computer system’s been fooling everyone for the past seventy-five years! You think the three of us are going to outsmart it? It’s just been toying with us all along! Playing! Like …”

  Tessa could tell he was going to say, Like it was just playing with me, making me a hero. Making everyone think I was so great. Making me think I was so great… and then think I was so awful.

  Gideon let his head fall back to the floor.

  “But the computer system …,” Tessa began, and then stopped, because she couldn’t straighten out the tangle of her thoughts.

  Did the computer system want them to die? Why would that be its goal?

  To keep its secret, Tessa thought.

  But the computer system could have stopped them long before this point. It had had control over their plane when they were flying back into Eastam—it easily could have made them crash if it’d wanted. Or, for that matter, it probably could have caused a crash when they were flying out of Eastam in the first place, into the war zone.

  But it didn’t do that, Tessa thought. It let us keep going until we found out the secret. Was that its goal? Why?

  Tessa looked back and forth between Dek and Gideon, hoping one of them would figure all this out before she had to. They were both so much smarter than Tessa. Or, at least, better with computers, better with their hands, better with mechanical things, better with everything that Tessa had always been taught really mattered.