All Quiet on the Western Wavefront -

All Quiet on the Western Wavefront

By Andre Infante

I stared at myself in the reflection of the shiny boots. These were boots of the highest order. These were boots polished so thoroughly and with such mad vigor that the leather was nearly translucent. They had a beautiful, buttery red to them in the shine. They were, in short, officer’s boots. I looked up the leg they were attached to into a smiling, shadowed face. A pair of arms with a clipboard jutted out at a forty five degree angle.

                “Are you private Shorts?”

                I nodded, from knees near the latrine.    He eyed me with some curiosity, and then said,

                “I’m Major Lee Casey. I have orders to interview you for the Screaming Cats project. Come with me.”

                I stood up, mopped my face with a clean rag, dropped the scrubby into the bin, and followed him across the base. The sun was at my back, and my neck prickled uncomfortably. This climate was never meant to support redheads. I had so little melanin in my skin that a hard glance had been known to cause redness. Between the heat, the sun, and the dry, I looked like a burn victim three hundred days out of the year.

                Outside the automated guns and the mine strip and the fences, the flat, empty Afghanistan desert stretched away to the limit of eyesight, marred only slightly by the odd protrusion of mountains. Casey looked uncomfortable too. He clearly wasn’t used to being out in the sun, and looked as though his skin didn’t quite fit right on his bones.

                We got to the low, gray cinderblock compound where the officers lived. It looked pretty much the same as the soldier’s building, except it was bigger, housed a quarter as many people, and the air conditioning tended to work.   Casey punched his access code in, and we climbed into the air-conditioned bliss. His whole body loosened, and his face slumped down his bones. He heaved a sigh.

                He led me across the lobby to the administrative wing, which given the hushed tones it was usually pronounced in might as well have had a big sign on it saying ‘Top Secret Shit Here’. I knew the way, I’d just gone in for an interview the week before. He punched in three codes to get in, and led me into the office. I sat down on the chair across from the desk. He sat down, smiled at me pleasantly, and began the interview. After some perfunctory questions about name, rank, and health, he moved on to my last interview.

                “Let me see- says here, you told the last interviewer that you were interested in the project because ‘it has an awesome name.’”

                He raised an eyebrow. I kept my face carefully arranged.

                “Yessir, that’s correct. In honesty, sir, by that point in the interview I did not actually expect to be coming back. It does have an awesome name, sir.”

                He didn’t change his expression.

                “Why didn’t you expect to be coming back? You’re a picture of physical health. Your psych record is spotless. A few instances of insubordination, but no formal reprimands. You served admirably so far. You are the perfect candidate.”

                I hesitated.

                “Well, sir, I got the impression that it was all very top-secret, whatever ‘it’ is, and it seemed to me that you wanted someone from black ops, not a jarhead, sir.”

                He shook his head.

                “Not at all. What we want is exactly that, a ‘jarhead.’ An ordinary, healthy American soldier. You might be happy to hear that you’ve been accepted. Aside from your odd answer to that question, you’re ideal.”

He pushed a clipboard towards me, and a pen.

                “You are hereby under orders to speak of what you see next to absolutely no-one with less than black clearance. If you do, you will be court-martialed, charged with treason, and probably executed.”

                He settled back.

                “With that said, you may leave now, if you wish. This program operates on a strictly volunteer basis. If you are still interested, sign on the dotted line. If you wish to return to scrubbing the latrines, I will escort you back to your post with nothing more said.”

                I thought about it for a minute or so, then picked up the pen and signed.

                He nodded, curtly, and led me off down a black corridor to an elevator. He had to get another guy to come and enter a pass-code at the same time as him to get the elevator to open. I quietly memorized the blur of fingers. It was easy. Who knew when I might come in handy. Then I noticed something that frankly scared me. The guy was a three star general. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but no one talks about what it did to the stupid jarhead.

                The elevator took us on a surprisingly long trip down. I had no idea this facility extended so far down. Then again, none of the soldiers I knew had been here from the start. Just when you think you know a place…

                The elevator arrived with a minimum of fanfare. We were in a surprisingly large concrete room, with flat fluorescent lighting. A lot of machinery was arranged around a point in the middle. The whole place had a spotless, clean-room vibe to it. I noticed a lot of soldiers with machine guns standing around the border eyeing us suspiciously. I also noticed a minimum of paper, and the shapes of red incendiary charged attached to the hard drive of each computer. The army was growing increasingly paranoid about being able to dispose of data as quickly as possible.

                He waved over a couple of lab-coat types, one of whom had the thickest coke-bottle glasses I’ve ever seen. On a good day, he could probably count the rings on Saturn. Casey told them that he wanted me to be shown a demonstration of ‘the box’. He said to run one of the old standbys.

                I was lead to the middle of the room. There was a black box suspended on stainless steel cables from the ceiling. The top was elevated on magnetic rams. A fistful of cables plugged into one end. A series of large grey plates were mounted at intervals around it. It seemed to be idling, in a sense. The whole arrangement hummed and smelled like ozone. After a brief wait while I examined the machinery, one of the labcoat folks returned carrying a peeved-looking longhair tabby cat. He was a muddy orange, on the fat side, with a sleepy demeanor.

                Casey glanced at me.

                “This is Fluffy. “

                The labcoat dropped the cat into the box without ceremony, adjusted something inside the box, and pushed a button. A pneumatic cylinder hissed, and the lid came down, sealed onto the box with all the finality of a coffin door slamming. There was a soft click and hum, like a fluorescent light coming on. Casey lead me to a desk with a monitor right next to the box. I squinted at the screen. There was a video feed of the cat, pacing backwards and forwards in the box (or, as I was already referring to it in my mind, the Box; the thing had a kind of deepest gravity to it that demanded capitalization). The field turned on, the image on the monitor burned, briefly, and something electric came into the air that set my teeth on edge. The major smiled pleasantly at me.

                “Are you familiar with the Schrodinger’s cat thought experiment, Private?”

                I shook my head.

                “Well, it doesn’t really matter, since you’re about to see it. Just – look, accept for the moment that particles tend to occupy every possible state until they are observed. That is called a superposition. Well, this box allows us to generate a field which temporarily prevents superpositions from being destroyed by observation. The field can be adjusted to last any period of time. For the purposes of this demonstration, the field has been adjusted to last for four seconds, and is being switched on and off at four second intervals, thus providing constant coverage. The upper limit to how long we can make the effects last seems to be around two hundred years.”

                He nodded at a small black box on the monitor.

                “Right now, all universes within the box are identical. However, that box is an electronic bell. The cat has been trained to approach the bell if it rings. Don’t ask me how they trained the cat, so far as I’m concerned that’s the bigger miracle here, but they have. In about four second, a sample of radium will be exposed to a Geiger counter inside the bell.   If it decays inside one second , the alarm will ring. If it doesn’t, it won’t.   The odds of this are exactly fifty percent. Watch.

                There was no sound feed, but a little light went on at the top. I peered at it. The cat looked at it, and something was wrong with the angle of its neck. What happened next is extremely difficult to describe. The cat sort of… peeled away from itself, like a water droplet splitting on a car windshield. It looked momentarily shaken as it stepped out of its own body, and then it walked towards the buzzer. I looked incredulously at the two cats sitting in the box. The one near the bell opened its mouth and looked like it was howling insistently.

                The major grinned at me, showing teeth. I gaped. I looked at him.

                “If I were to open that box…”

                His smile cooled a degree.

                “You’d be scrubbing Fluffy off the walls for months. You can’t leave the field active without some kind of inhibitor device,” and here he hesitated for a second, “I suppose I give it away a little when I tell you that this box is old hat. Incredibly crude, really. If we needed to lug around a heatproof, soundproof, lightproof box to use the effect, it’d be a magic trick. The United States does not spend money on magic tricks.”

                He jerked his head at a lab coat.

                “Kill the field.”

                One of them did something on a keyboard. I noted what he had done to turn the box on and off. You never knew. The humming died almost instantly. Onscreen, the cat in its original position looked vaguely uncomfortable, blurred weirdly, and then inexplicably vanished, as though it had never been. I suppose, if I recalled a half-dozen fuzzy physics lectures correctly, the other cat really hadn’t . The lid was raised on its mount with a vague electric pop. The other cat, looking annoyed, was hoisted out of the box and carried away. I blinked.

                “You said you can make the effect last for two hundred years?”

                He nodded.

                “Of course, we can’t simply irradiate them and let them out of the box. That would be quite catastrophic for the poor cat. Making cats explode looks very bad when your budget is up for review. Hence, we need something to keep you from forking exponentially.” He glanced at me. “I think it’s time you met Frankie Baum.”

                He led me away from the box towards a squat white tent towards the edge of the room. I noticed more offices along the walls, and realized they must have had an extensive office complex down here, right under our feet this whole time. We entered the tent, and found a small living quarters. A hot plate sat atop a pantry against one wall. A table sat in the middle, with a chair and a place for one. I could see a cot and dresser around the corner.

                A man stepped out of the bedroom, dressed in sweat pants and a black T-shirt. A black band, like a bulky wristwatch was strapped around his bicep. His hair was damp. He nodded pleasantly at Casey, and then shot me a glance.

                “This the new guy?”

                Unsure of his rank, I waited to be asked directly. The major nodded at me.

                “Frank, this is Private Shorts. Shorts, meet Private Baum. He’s been our guinea pig from the start. He was the first human in the box.”

                I relaxed and shook his hand. A moment later, there was a flushing sound, and a man stepped out from behind the curtain. I blinked. There was no question, it was Frankie Baum. The likeness was uncanny. The Frankie to the right nodded professionally to the one on the right.

                He smiled pleasantly at me, but didn’t seem to recognize me. I blinked. Twins? God, tell me they’re twins.

                The major was practically bouncing with excitement.

                “Isn’t it fantastic? Frankie, show him the stabilizer.”

                The first Frankie smiled at me, and raised up the band on his arm for my inspection. It hummed, weirdly, and it looked out of place. The light sleeted off it, instead of hitting it directly.

                “So long as I keep this in the two megawatt range, it simply keeps me from forking. If I turn it up much higher, my wavefront will collapse, and I’ll just go poof. Gone. If I turn it down to the one megawatt range for a second, I fork once.”

                He punched a small red button. A buzzer rang. He stepped sideways out of his own body.   Now there were three Frankie’s in the room. The one on the right smiled at me, said

                “See?”

                And then pushed a black button on his band. He shifted uncomfortably, and vanished. I would have expected a thunderclap of air rushing in to fill the vacuum, but it was entirely silent. It was simply as though he had never been there.

                The Frankie who had come out of the toilet nodded at the original.

                “I’ll go run the weapons test, since it looks like you’re busy. We last forked at what, noon? I’ll make a note in the journal about anything important and then de-spawn.”

                The first Frankie nodded absently. The second one waved politely at us, and left.

                I tried to think about what I’d just heard.

                “Isn’t that kind of suicide?”

                Frankie paused, considering this.

                “Not exactly. I mean, he’s me, after all. It’s more of a kind of amnesia. I fork copies to do boring stuff and then they de-spawn afterwards. It’s not like it’s anything worth remembering. All in all, my life is pretty good. I don’t remember doing any work, but I keep getting commended for it. I just sit here all day and read my books and watch television.”

                He sucked air through his teeth.

                “The geeks don’t mind, either, because all the forking provides useful data. Right not, the only reason we’re not unrolling this tech right now is because all you need is a portable inhibitor cranked up to full, and your soldiers will disappear like soap bubbles. They’re going to fork him a few dozen times, put different kinds of shields on him, and then expose him to the field.”

                I stared. This was insane. They were killing soldiers. God knew how many, hundreds probably. On another level, though, I was furiously thinking through the implications. For starters, it’d be the end of the recruitment crisis. You’d only ever need one really good soldier. One of everything, duplicated tens of thousands of times. Twenty people could provide the US with an army of millions, complete with chain of command. A thought struck me. I turned to Frankie.

                “What happens if you take the stabilizer off?”

                Frankie’ facial expression froze. His eyes got stormy.

                “Nothing good.”

                I nodded, as he and Casey turned away to discuss something.

                I was so fucked.

After some discussion, Casey took my outside the tent.

“Look, um, what Frankie told you back there wasn’t the complete truth. We do have a shielding technology. Look, frankly, Frankie is a great guy. He’s been patient to a fault, a great lab rat, no ethics to speak of – but, he’s a terrible soldier. We’re ready to unroll the technology now, just – not with him. That’s where you come in. You’ll be running the first live missions with the rig. Come on, let’s get you into the box.”

                He led me back to the box. Once we got there, he pulled a black band out of his pocket and wrapped it around my arm. It felt weirdly cold, and a nasty little electric stiffness settled into the arm. He gestured into the box. I got in. After a minute, the lid shut on my head. I felt a deep, instant claustrophobia.    After a moment, I felt a humming that hurt my bones, heard the major’s voice tinnily over an intercom.

                “Alright, the field’s on. If you hear a bell, climb towards the alarm and push the black button on your wristband. If you don’t, then push the green button on the band.”

                I waited. I didn’t hear an alarm, but I felt a bizarre humming, aching itchy sensation, and another me climbed out of my body. He curled up next the buzzer on the other side of the box, looking like he was in shock.

                “Push the button!”

                I jumped, and hit it. My double did the same.

                My double made eye contact with me. He looked scared. He scratched his leg.

                “Kill the field.”

                My double paused, wavered, and vanished.

The lid was raised on the box. I smelled ozone. The major helped me out. I was led to my room. The room was pretty similar to Frankie’s, except an actual room, instead of a tent. There was a cot in one corner, a sink, toilet and shower behind a curtain in another, a desk with a hot plate, and a closet. I ignored it all of this, walked to the bed, and laid down.

                I was woken the next morning at the crack of dawn for training. The course, fortunately,was very brief. There were only four buttons on the stabilizer. I practiced splitting myself, and killing off copies. That was really hard for me. I did it, though. I wasn’t going to be accused of doing anything less than I had to. In all, it took all of about three hours. After the course, the lab coats left and Major Casey walked up to me.

                “Nice work. You’ll do fine. Listen, I just got the call. The President’s signed off on a test mission. We’re all set to deploy you in test run at the end of the week, against a Taliban camp about fifty miles from here. In the mean time, I suggest you keep practicing.”

                The days fell in a routine. I would wake up at the crack of dawn, train for a few hours, take a nap, and go spend time with Frankie. We began to go out for drinks at the bar in the evenings. We had a kind of strange camaraderie, being the only two super-posited people on the planet (as he referred to us), with the possible exception of that damn cat. Besides, talking to my comrades and former friends made me nervous. I had to watch what I said with extraordinary caution. I could be more relaxed around him, though his attitude about the whole thing worried me. He was much more laid back about it than I was. He claimed to have had moral concerns at first, but to have gotten over them with all due haste.   I found myself having nightmares about suddenly finding myself a doomed double.

                And then the day dawned. I woke up out of bed, ate a good breakfast, and reported. They had a big armored truck, painted jet black. It had a quiet, quiet electric engine, and made next to no noise. They gave me an assault rifle, with its own inhibitor band wrapped around the stock. A small system of transmitters allowed the rifle to twin with me. I was not given body armor. When I asked why, the lab coat said it was to avoid any of me being captured. They stuck two electric leads into my skin. If my pulse stopped reading, I would instantly de-spawn. If the band was moved or damaged, it would de-spawn. If all else failed, all copies would automatically de-spawn in three hours.

After an hour’s practice and training, they dragged me into a truck and drove me across the desert in the dead of night, and dropped me outside a trashed city at two in the morning.   I didn’t know the name of the city, but it was clear that it had been a battlefield, and that we hadn’t won. The truck arrived. I reached downward, took a breath, and pushed the button on my bicep. I felt a brief, intense headache and an indescribable itching sensation all over my body, like my skin was getting pulled apart. I heard a buzzer in my ear, pause stupidly for a moment, and then remembered. I stepped to the right, and the buzzing, itching and pain stopped. I climbed back into the truck, and watched my double stare at me strangely, and then run off into the town. He began splitting almost immediately, spreading out to dozens, hundreds. The wave of soldiers hit the town, and began to erupt down the streets. As a unit, the doubles began to shoot. Spotlights came on. Automated machine guns began to rage. As the truck pulled away I watched myself die hundreds of times.

                I slumped in the silence at the back of the truck for a long time. When it got back to the base, I went into my room. Sleep was long in coming. I kept seeing my own face, staring back at me. The news came back in the morning. I’d won.   Hooray.

                The days kind of blurred, after that. Every day a battle. I was always the double who stayed. When the radium decayed and the alarm went off and didn’t, I was always the one who heard the alarm. Well, of course I was. I’m alive, thus I must always have been the one to hear the alarm. All I know is that I single-handedly turned the tide of the war in Afghanistan. I’m told I’m a hero.

                As time ran on, I began to get headaches, insomnia, nightmares. I also began to notice a change in the texture of my skin. It was definitely rougher. I told Frankie about it at the bar on the base. He stayed quiet for a long time, then he raised his thumb like a hitchhiker, turned it, and held it up for my inspection.   The thumbnail was gone. Well, not gone – more blurred. He simply had a hard patch on the back, with no obvious border. I just about jumped out of my skin.

                “I’ve been calling it quantum flu. I’ve got it, you’ve got it, the chimps they tested it on got it, even the fucking cat has it, a bit. Turns out that shifting matter in and out of freaky quantum contortions ain’t good for it’s ‘essential reality’, if you get my meaning. Hell, I mean, all the stabilizer does is look at us really hard to keep us stable. Think about that. We’re so unstable that we’re not even real unless someone’s watching.”

                I didn’t speak. This was the first time I’d seen Frankie show frustration with the situation. I found myself wondering how much of his unflappability was a show.

                He shook his head.

                “Ah well. It seems to have topped out. What’s a fingernail or two, anyway? Though, I have to say, my penis falling off was a bit of a shock.”

                I spat my drink onto the bar. He met my gaze gravely for a second, then broke out in a wide grin.

                “I’m fucking with you, man. Bruce and the entourage are fine. Drink up, then get some sleep. You look like shit.”

                The next morning was another battle, and things got bad. I had a bad feeling on the drive to the next combat site. I climbed out of the truck, and for the first time, I didn’t hear the buzzer. I felt an intense, physical fear as I watched my duplicate climb out of my body and get back into the truck. I felt an overwhelming urge to run after him, but fought it down. Oh fuck me.

                I turned around. Then, something streaked overhead. Behind me, the truck hopped comically, then exploded as he surface to air missile came down on top of it. I stared blankly for longer than I want to admit. Then I started to run, screaming quietly under my breath.

                “Ohshitohshitohshitshitshitshitshit…”

                I started spawning duplicates like crazy, fleeing as fast as possible. My duplicates did the same thing. They’d known I was coming. Missiles were crashing into our ranks, sending bodied flying everywhere before they evaporated. We won, in the end, but not without massive losses.   In the end, I was the only one to drag myself away, badly injured. I cut into my stabilizer with a pocket knife, to prevent it from killing me when the three hours were up. They found me after eight hours, lying in the sand under the baking sun, shot in the thigh twice. I was the only duplicate to survive.

                I spent some time in the base hospital, staring out the window at the desert, while they operated on the leg and treated me for heatstroke and moderate burns. After a few weeks, they gave me a clean bill of health and sent me back to my quarters.

                I tried to find Frankie. He wasn’t in his tent, nor at the bar, nor the commissary, nor anywhere else. I scoured up and down, growing worried. I didn’t find him for over three hours. Then, finally, I found the major, who told me that Frankie had been hospitalized the day prior after he collapsed. There was something very guilty in his eyes. I ran back to the hospital. It turns out he’d been in the wing right across from me.

                I barged past some nurses to see him. He looked blurry, like he wasn’t all there. I swear I could see the wall through his head. Sometimes he had more than two arms. Fizzing, flickering blood was running down his face from his nose. His bed linens were shredded. He wasn’t awake.   He didn’t awake for several hours, and when he did, he only said a few words. They were these:

                “Turns out, hah, turns out the ethics of the thing were the least of our problems. It’s the things you know perfectly well that kill you. I’m sorry, that wasn’t me. Dear god, there are so many voices in my head. Take care of that fucking cat, Rick. It’s been good to know you. Nurse, can you come push this button?   It’s the little black one. Ah. Tha-”

                And then he had never been there.

                What I felt then was a kind of blind, stupid rage. I fought it down, though, to a simmering fury at the pit of my stomach. I wasn’t stupid. I was patient. I waited over a week before I forked an illicit copy. During that time, I’d already requested a computer from the commissary, and stolen a rifle from a friend’s bunk long enough to duplicate it. I hid the duplicate under my mattress. When I made the duplicate, he snuck into the security terminal via the pass codes I’d memorized, and made some care sabotage. When the right day came, I waited until night and left my room. The alarm did not sound. I crossed the silent facility to the veterinary station, carrying the shotgun. I fired several rounds into the door, removing it. I located Fluffy after a few minutes. By now, the cat had the quantum flu, bad. He was wearing an inhibitor collar, simply to avoid the cat going supercritical. The cat had been sleeping, and looked annoyed in the extreme. It tried to bite me.

                “Yeah, well, I’m not doing it for you.   Bite me, and I’ll break your little legs,” I hissed at the cat, then loaded up my pack with food and water.

                I had pried the incendiary explosive charge out of my computer. I stuck it onto the lock on the blast doors and fired several shotgun rounds into it until it exploded. I was able to open the doors and use my pass codes to escape to the lobby. From there I found the garage and stole a Humvee. I fled the facility at a good clip.

                Evidently I tripped some alarm, because the army jeeps appeared behind me pretty quickly. They didn’t even try to warn me before they started shooting. I spawned some duplicates to give them hell, then turned back to flat desert stretching away ahead of me. Then, suddenly, the end of the car dipped and began to wheel back and forth. The blown tire began to cut into the ground. I had an idea. Almost entirely on impulse, I picked up Fluffy, ripped his collar off, and chucked him out the window. What happened next is pretty hard to explain.   I think I’d best explain it as simply the worst thing that I’ve ever seen. The shock wave slammed into the truck from behind, turning it over. I got thrown around the inside of the truck like a ragdoll. Behind me, I saw the other trucks getting sent flying by the detonating cat.    My head hit the steering column with a hard, meaty sound and everything stopped.

I woke up in a hospital bed. An extraordinarily pissed-looking cat was sitting on my chest, boring holes into my head. I reached out hesitantly to pet it. It bit me. Behind it, the major came into focus. I sucked on my finger, blinked, and said,

                “Where?”

                “Hospital. You’ll be court-martialed, of course, but I think we can avoid the treason charge, given what you’ve helped us make a valuable discovery.”

                He nodded out a window behind him, and I stared, slack-jawed at what I saw covering the desert of Afghanistan.

                “Oh fuck-“

                “-All of Afghanistan is like that. Totally brilliant. By the time the effect stopped, the whole county was affected. The Taliban soldiers are now claiming that we are literally Satan. The enemy moral dropped so low after the third day that most of them have either killed themselves or surrendered. We won.”

                He grinned largely.

                “Never would have occurred to any sane person to do it, but it’s great. We started airdropping aid packages into the villages who surrender. I’m told that inside a year, the blood and meat will have tremendously increased the fertility of the soil. Removing all the hair will be a problem, though.”

                I stared blankly at the wall, then turned to the cat, who was attempting to eat my boots.

                “And Fluffy?”

                “We keep extras.”

                I nodded, closing my eyes. I felt the regulator band on my arm. I found the little black button.

                The major was ranting, bright-eyed. He seemed ecstatic.

                “This is the weapon of the future. Not cats, though, too hard to control. Birds, maybe. Yeah, pigeons, that’s it. Train them to fly into enemy territory, and detonate them. Why, we’ll be ruling the world inside the decade…”

All Quiet on the Western Wavefront

By Andre Infante

Author's Note: I'm sorry about the title, I really am. I couldn't help myself. It's a sickness.

     I stared at myself in the reflection of the shiny boots. These were boots of the highest order. These were boots polished so thoroughly and with such mad vigor that the leather was nearly translucent. They had a beautiful, buttery red to them in the shine. They were, in short, officer’s boots. I looked up the leg they were attached to into the face of a smiling, dark-faced man with a clipboard. He peered down at me.

                “Are you private Shorts?”

                I nodded, from my position near the latrine on the floor.    He eyed me with some curiosity, and then said,

                “I’m Major Lee Casey. I have orders to interview you for the Screaming Cats project. Come with me.”

                I stood up, mopped my face with a clean rag, dropped the scrubby into the bin, and followed him across the base. The sun was at my back, and my neck prickled uncomfortably. This climate was never meant to support redheads. I had so little melanin in my skin that a hard glance had been known to cause redness. Between the heat, the sun, and the dry, I looked like a burn victim three hundred days out of the year.

                Outside the automated guns and the mine strip and the fences, the flat, empty Afghanistan desert stretched away to the limit of eyesight, marred only slightly by the odd protrusion of mountains. Casey looked uncomfortable too. He clearly wasn’t used to being out in the sun, and looked as though his skin didn’t quite fit right on his bones.

                We got to the low, gray cinderblock compound where the officers lived. It looked pretty much the same as the soldier’s building, except it was bigger, housed a quarter as many people, and the air conditioning tended to work.   Casey punched his access code in, and we climbed into the air-conditioned bliss. His whole body loosened, and his face slumped down his bones. He heaved a sigh.

                He led me across the lobby to the administrative wing, which given the hushed tones it was usually pronounced in might as well have had a big sign on it saying ‘Top Secret Shit Here’. I knew the way, I’d just gone in for an interview the week before. He punched in three codes to get in, and led me into the office. I sat down on the chair across from the desk. He sat down, smiled at me pleasantly, and began the interview. After some perfunctory questions about name, rank, and health, he moved on to my last interview.

                “Let me see- says here, you told the last interviewer that you were interested in the project because ‘it has an awesome name.’”

                He raised an eyebrow. I kept my face carefully arranged.

                “Yessir, that’s correct. In honesty, sir, by that point in the interview I did not actually expect to be coming back. It does have an awesome name, sir.”

                He didn’t change his expression.

                “Why didn’t you expect to be coming back? You’re a picture of physical health. Your psych record is spotless. A few instances of insubordination, but no formal reprimands. You served admirably so far. You are the perfect candidate.”

                I hesitated.

                “Well, sir, I got the impression that it was all very top-secret, whatever ‘it’ is, and it seemed to me that you wanted someone from black ops, not a jarhead, sir.”

                He shook his head.

                “Not at all. What we want is exactly that, a ‘jarhead.’ An ordinary, healthy American soldier. You might be happy to hear that you’ve been accepted. Aside from your odd answer to that question, you’re ideal.”

He pushed a clipboard towards me, and a pen.

                “You are hereby under orders to speak of what you see next to absolutely no-one with less than black clearance. If you do, you will be court-martialed, charged with treason, and probably executed.”

                He settled back.

                “With that said, you may leave now, if you wish. This program operates on a strictly volunteer basis. If you are still interested, sign on the dotted line. If you wish to return to scrubbing the latrines, I will escort you back to your post with nothing more said.”

                I thought about it for a minute or so, then picked up the pen and signed.

                He nodded, curtly, and led me off down a black corridor to an elevator. He had to get another guy to come and enter a pass-code at the same time as him to get the elevator to open. I quietly memorized the blur of fingers. It was easy. Who knew when I might come in handy. Then I noticed something that frankly scared me. The guy was a three star general. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but no one talks about what it did to the stupid jarhead.

                The elevator took us on a surprisingly long trip down. I had no idea this facility extended so far down. Then again, none of the soldiers I knew had been here from the start. Just when you think you know a place…

                The elevator arrived with a minimum of fanfare. We were in a surprisingly large concrete room, with flat fluorescent lighting. A lot of machinery was arranged around a point in the middle. The whole place had a spotless, clean-room vibe to it. I noticed a lot of soldiers with machine guns standing around the border eyeing us suspiciously. I also noticed a minimum of paper, and the shapes of red incendiary charged attached to the hard drive of each computer. The army was growing increasingly paranoid about being able to dispose of data as quickly as possible.

                He waved over a couple of lab-coat types, one of whom had the thickest coke-bottle glasses I’ve ever seen. On a good day, he could probably count the rings on Saturn. Casey told them that he wanted me to be shown a demonstration of ‘the box’. He said to run one of the old standbys.

                I was lead to the middle of the room. There was a black box suspended on stainless steel cables from the ceiling. The top was elevated on magnetic rams. A fistful of cables plugged into one end. A series of large grey plates were mounted at intervals around it. It seemed to be idling, in a sense. The whole arrangement hummed and smelled like ozone. After a brief wait while I examined the machinery, one of the labcoat folks returned carrying a peeved-looking longhair tabby cat. He was a muddy orange, on the fat side, with a sleepy demeanor.

                Casey glanced at me.

                “This is Fluffy. “

                The labcoat dropped the cat into the box without ceremony, adjusted something inside the box, and pushed a button. A pneumatic cylinder hissed, and the lid came down, sealed onto the box with all the finality of a coffin door slamming. There was a soft click and hum, like a fluorescent light coming on. Casey lead me to a desk with a monitor right next to the box. I squinted at the screen. There was a video feed of the cat, pacing backwards and forwards in the box (or, as I was already referring to it in my mind, the Box; the thing had a kind of deepest gravity to it that demanded capitalization). The field turned on, the image on the monitor burned, briefly, and something electric came into the air that set my teeth on edge. The major smiled pleasantly at me.

                “Are you familiar with the Schrodinger’s cat thought experiment, Private?”

                I shook my head.

                “Well, it doesn’t really matter, since you’re about to see it. Just – look, accept for the moment that particles tend to occupy every possible state until they are observed. That is called a superposition. Well, this box allows us to generate a field which temporarily prevents superpositions from being destroyed by observation. The field can be adjusted to last any period of time. For the purposes of this demonstration, the field has been adjusted to last for four seconds, and is being switched on and off at four second intervals, thus providing constant coverage. The upper limit to how long we can make the effects last seems to be around two hundred years.”

                He nodded at a small black box on the monitor.

                “Right now, all universes within the box are identical. However, that box is an electronic bell. The cat has been trained to approach the bell if it rings. Don’t ask me how they trained the cat, so far as I’m concerned that’s the bigger miracle here, but they have. In about four second, a sample of radium will be exposed to a Geiger counter inside the bell.   If it decays inside one second , the alarm will ring. If it doesn’t, it won’t.   The odds of this are exactly fifty percent. Watch.

                There was no sound feed, but a little light went on at the top. I peered at it. The cat looked at it, and something was wrong with the angle of its neck. What happened next is extremely difficult to describe. The cat sort of… peeled away from itself, like a water droplet splitting on a car windshield. It looked momentarily shaken as it stepped out of its own body, and then it walked towards the buzzer. I looked incredulously at the two cats sitting in the box. The one near the bell opened its mouth and looked like it was howling insistently.

                The major grinned at me, showing teeth. I gaped. I looked at him.

                “If I were to open that box…”

                His smile cooled a degree.

                “You’d be scrubbing Fluffy off the walls for months. You can’t leave the field active without some kind of inhibitor device,” and here he hesitated for a second, “I suppose I give it away a little when I tell you that this box is old hat. Incredibly crude, really. If we needed to lug around a heatproof, soundproof, lightproof box to use the effect, it’d be a magic trick. The United States does not spend money on magic tricks.”

                He jerked his head at a lab coat.

                “Kill the field.”

                One of them did something on a keyboard. I noted what he had done to turn the box on and off. You never knew. The humming died almost instantly. Onscreen, the cat in its original position looked vaguely uncomfortable, blurred weirdly, and then inexplicably vanished, as though it had never been. I suppose, if I recalled a half-dozen fuzzy physics lectures correctly, the other cat really hadn’t . The lid was raised on its mount with a vague electric pop. The other cat, looking annoyed, was hoisted out of the box and carried away. I blinked.

                “You said you can make the effect last for two hundred years?”

                He nodded.

                “Of course, we can’t simply irradiate them and let them out of the box. That would be quite catastrophic for the poor cat. Making cats explode looks very bad when your budget is up for review. Hence, we need something to keep you from forking exponentially.” He glanced at me. “I think it’s time you met Frankie Baum.”

                He led me away from the box towards a squat white tent towards the edge of the room. I noticed more offices along the walls, and realized they must have had an extensive office complex down here, right under our feet this whole time. We entered the tent, and found a small living quarters. A hot plate sat atop a pantry against one wall. A table sat in the middle, with a chair and a place for one. I could see a cot and dresser around the corner.

                A man stepped out of the bedroom, dressed in sweat pants and a black T-shirt. A black band, like a bulky wristwatch was strapped around his bicep. His hair was damp. He nodded pleasantly at Casey, and then shot me a glance.

                “This the new guy?”

                Unsure of his rank, I waited to be asked directly. The major nodded at me.

                “Frank, this is Private Shorts. Shorts, meet Private Baum. He’s been our guinea pig from the start. He was the first human in the box.”

                I relaxed and shook his hand. A moment later, there was a flushing sound, and a man stepped out from behind the curtain. I blinked. There was no question, it was Frankie Baum. The likeness was uncanny. The Frankie to the right nodded professionally to the one on the right.

                He smiled pleasantly at me, but didn’t seem to recognize me. I blinked. Twins? God, tell me they’re twins.

                The major was practically bouncing with excitement.

                “Isn’t it fantastic? Frankie, show him the stabilizer.”

                The first Frankie smiled at me, and raised up the band on his arm for my inspection. It hummed, weirdly, and it looked out of place. The light sleeted off it, instead of hitting it directly.

                “So long as I keep this in the two megawatt range, it simply keeps me from forking. If I turn it up much higher, my wavefront will collapse, and I’ll just go poof. Gone. If I turn it down to the one megawatt range for a second, I fork once.”

                He punched a small red button. A buzzer rang. He stepped sideways out of his own body.   Now there were three Frankie’s in the room. The one on the right smiled at me, said

                “See?”

                And then pushed a black button on his band. He shifted uncomfortably, and vanished. I would have expected a thunderclap of air rushing in to fill the vacuum, but it was entirely silent. It was simply as though he had never been there.

                The Frankie who had come out of the toilet nodded at the original.

                “I’ll go run the weapons test, since it looks like you’re busy. We last forked at what, noon? I’ll make a note in the journal about anything important and then de-spawn.”

                The first Frankie nodded absently. The second one waved politely at us, and left.

                I tried to think about what I’d just heard.

                “Isn’t that kind of suicide?”

                Frankie paused, considering this.

                “Not exactly. I mean, he’s me, after all. It’s more of a kind of amnesia. I fork copies to do boring stuff and then they de-spawn afterwards. It’s not like it’s anything worth remembering. All in all, my life is pretty good. I don’t remember doing any work, but I keep getting commended for it. I just sit here all day and read my books and watch television.”

                He sucked air through his teeth.

                “The geeks don’t mind, either, because all the forking provides useful data. Right not, the only reason we’re not unrolling this tech right now is because all you need is a portable inhibitor cranked up to full, and your soldiers will disappear like soap bubbles. They’re going to fork him a few dozen times, put different kinds of shields on him, and then expose him to the field.”

                I stared. This was insane. They were killing soldiers. God knew how many, hundreds probably. On another level, though, I was furiously thinking through the implications. For starters, it’d be the end of the recruitment crisis. You’d only ever need one really good soldier. One of everything, duplicated tens of thousands of times. Twenty people could provide the US with an army of millions, complete with chain of command. A thought struck me. I turned to Frankie.

                “What happens if you take the stabilizer off?”

                Frankie’ facial expression froze. His eyes got stormy.

                “Nothing good.”

                I nodded, as he and Casey turned away to discuss something.

                I was so fucked.

After some discussion, Casey took my outside the tent.

“Look, um, what Frankie told you back there wasn’t the complete truth. We do have a shielding technology. Look, frankly, Frankie is a great guy. He’s been patient to a fault, a great lab rat, no ethics to speak of – but, he’s a terrible soldier. We’re ready to unroll the technology now, just – not with him. That’s where you come in. You’ll be running the first live missions with the rig. Come on, let’s get you into the box.”

                He led me back to the box. Once we got there, he pulled a black band out of his pocket and wrapped it around my arm. It felt weirdly cold, and a nasty little electric stiffness settled into the arm. He gestured into the box. I got in. After a minute, the lid shut on my head. I felt a deep, instant claustrophobia.    After a moment, I felt a humming that hurt my bones, heard the major’s voice tinnily over an intercom.

                “Alright, the field’s on. If you hear a bell, climb towards the alarm and push the black button on your wristband. If you don’t, then push the green button on the band.”

                I waited. I didn’t hear an alarm, but I felt a bizarre humming, aching itchy sensation, and another me climbed out of my body. He curled up next the buzzer on the other side of the box, looking like he was in shock.

                “Push the button!”

                I jumped, and hit it. My double did the same.

                My double made eye contact with me. He looked scared. He scratched his leg.

                “Kill the field.”

                My double paused, wavered, and vanished.

The lid was raised on the box. I smelled ozone. The major helped me out. I was led to my room. The room was pretty similar to Frankie’s, except an actual room, instead of a tent. There was a cot in one corner, a sink, toilet and shower behind a curtain in another, a desk with a hot plate, and a closet. I ignored it all of this, walked to the bed, and laid down.

                I was woken the next morning at the crack of dawn for training. The course, fortunately,was very brief. There were only four buttons on the stabilizer. I practiced splitting myself, and killing off copies. That was really hard for me. I did it, though. I wasn’t going to be accused of doing anything less than I had to. In all, it took all of about three hours. After the course, the lab coats left and Major Casey walked up to me.

                “Nice work. You’ll do fine. Listen, I just got the call. The President’s signed off on a test mission. We’re all set to deploy you in test run at the end of the week, against a Taliban camp about fifty miles from here. In the mean time, I suggest you keep practicing.”

                The days fell in a routine. I would wake up at the crack of dawn, train for a few hours, take a nap, and go spend time with Frankie. We began to go out for drinks at the bar in the evenings. We had a kind of strange camaraderie, being the only two super-posited people on the planet (as he referred to us), with the possible exception of that damn cat. Besides, talking to my comrades and former friends made me nervous. I had to watch what I said with extraordinary caution. I could be more relaxed around him, though his attitude about the whole thing worried me. He was much more laid back about it than I was. He claimed to have had moral concerns at first, but to have gotten over them with all due haste.   I found myself having nightmares about suddenly finding myself a doomed double.

                And then the day dawned. I woke up out of bed, ate a good breakfast, and reported. They had a big armored truck, painted jet black. It had a quiet, quiet electric engine, and made next to no noise. They gave me an assault rifle, with its own inhibitor band wrapped around the stock. A small system of transmitters allowed the rifle to twin with me. I was not given body armor. When I asked why, the lab coat said it was to avoid any of me being captured. They stuck two electric leads into my skin. If my pulse stopped reading, I would instantly de-spawn. If the band was moved or damaged, it would de-spawn. If all else failed, all copies would automatically de-spawn in three hours.

After an hour’s practice and training, they dragged me into a truck and drove me across the desert in the dead of night, and dropped me outside a trashed city at two in the morning.   I didn’t know the name of the city, but it was clear that it had been a battlefield, and that we hadn’t won. The truck arrived. I reached downward, took a breath, and pushed the button on my bicep. I felt a brief, intense headache and an indescribable itching sensation all over my body, like my skin was getting pulled apart. I heard a buzzer in my ear, pause stupidly for a moment, and then remembered. I stepped to the right, and the buzzing, itching and pain stopped. I climbed back into the truck, and watched my double stare at me strangely, and then run off into the town. He began splitting almost immediately, spreading out to dozens, hundreds. The wave of soldiers hit the town, and began to erupt down the streets. As a unit, the doubles began to shoot. Spotlights came on. Automated machine guns began to rage. As the truck pulled away I watched myself die hundreds of times.

                I slumped in the silence at the back of the truck for a long time. When it got back to the base, I went into my room. Sleep was long in coming. I kept seeing my own face, staring back at me. The news came back in the morning. I’d won.   Hooray.

                The days kind of blurred, after that. Every day a battle. I was always the double who stayed. When the radium decayed and the alarm went off and didn’t, I was always the one who heard the alarm. Well, of course I was. I’m alive, thus I must always have been the one to hear the alarm. All I know is that I single-handedly turned the tide of the war in Afghanistan. I’m told I’m a hero.

                As time ran on, I began to get headaches, insomnia, nightmares. I also began to notice a change in the texture of my skin. It was definitely rougher. I told Frankie about it at the bar on the base. He stayed quiet for a long time, then he raised his thumb like a hitchhiker, turned it, and held it up for my inspection.   The thumbnail was gone. Well, not gone – more blurred. He simply had a hard patch on the back, with no obvious border. I just about jumped out of my skin.

                “I’ve been calling it quantum flu. I’ve got it, you’ve got it, the chimps they tested it on got it, even the fucking cat has it, a bit. Turns out that shifting matter in and out of freaky quantum contortions ain’t good for it’s ‘essential reality’, if you get my meaning. Hell, I mean, all the stabilizer does is look at us really hard to keep us stable. Think about that. We’re so unstable that we’re not even real unless someone’s watching.”

                I didn’t speak. This was the first time I’d seen Frankie show frustration with the situation. I found myself wondering how much of his unflappability was a show.

                He shook his head.

                “Ah well. It seems to have topped out. What’s a fingernail or two, anyway? Though, I have to say, my penis falling off was a bit of a shock.”

                I spat my drink onto the bar. He met my gaze gravely for a second, then broke out in a wide grin.

                “I’m fucking with you, man. Bruce and the entourage are fine. Drink up, then get some sleep. You look like shit.”

                The next morning was another battle, and things got bad. I had a bad feeling on the drive to the next combat site. I climbed out of the truck, and for the first time, I didn’t hear the buzzer. I felt an intense, physical fear as I watched my duplicate climb out of my body and get back into the truck. I felt an overwhelming urge to run after him, but fought it down. Oh fuck me.

                I turned around. Then, something streaked overhead. Behind me, the truck hopped comically, then exploded as he surface to air missile came down on top of it. I stared blankly for longer than I want to admit. Then I started to run, screaming quietly under my breath.

                “Ohshitohshitohshitshitshitshitshit…”

                I started spawning duplicates like crazy, fleeing as fast as possible. My duplicates did the same thing. They’d known I was coming. Missiles were crashing into our ranks, sending bodied flying everywhere before they evaporated. We won, in the end, but not without massive losses.   In the end, I was the only one to drag myself away, badly injured. I cut into my stabilizer with a pocket knife, to prevent it from killing me when the three hours were up. They found me after eight hours, lying in the sand under the baking sun, shot in the thigh twice. I was the only duplicate to survive.

                I spent some time in the base hospital, staring out the window at the desert, while they operated on the leg and treated me for heatstroke and moderate burns. After a few weeks, they gave me a clean bill of health and sent me back to my quarters.

                I tried to find Frankie. He wasn’t in his tent, nor at the bar, nor the commissary, nor anywhere else. I scoured up and down, growing worried. I didn’t find him for over three hours. Then, finally, I found the major, who told me that Frankie had been hospitalized the day prior after he collapsed. There was something very guilty in his eyes. I ran back to the hospital. It turns out he’d been in the wing right across from me.

                I barged past some nurses to see him. He looked blurry, like he wasn’t all there. I swear I could see the wall through his head. Sometimes he had more than two arms. Fizzing, flickering blood was running down his face from his nose. His bed linens were shredded. He wasn’t awake.   He didn’t awake for several hours, and when he did, he only said a few words. They were these:

                “Turns out, hah, turns out the ethics of the thing were the least of our problems. It’s the things you know perfectly well that kill you. I’m sorry, that wasn’t me. Dear god, there are so many voices in my head. Take care of that fucking cat, Rick. It’s been good to know you. Nurse, can you come push this button?   It’s the little black one. Ah. Tha-”

                And then he had never been there.

                What I felt then was a kind of blind, stupid rage. I fought it down, though, to a simmering fury at the pit of my stomach. I wasn’t stupid. I was patient. I waited over a week before I forked an illicit copy. During that time, I’d already requested a computer from the commissary, and stolen a rifle from a friend’s bunk long enough to duplicate it. I hid the duplicate under my mattress. When I made the duplicate, he snuck into the security terminal via the pass codes I’d memorized, and made some care sabotage. When the right day came, I waited until night and left my room. The alarm did not sound. I crossed the silent facility to the veterinary station, carrying the shotgun. I fired several rounds into the door, removing it. I located Fluffy after a few minutes. By now, the cat had the quantum flu, bad. He was wearing an inhibitor collar, simply to avoid the cat going supercritical. The cat had been sleeping, and looked annoyed in the extreme. It tried to bite me.

                “Yeah, well, I’m not doing it for you.   Bite me, and I’ll break your little legs,” I hissed at the cat, then loaded up my pack with food and water.

                I had pried the incendiary explosive charge out of my computer. I stuck it onto the lock on the blast doors and fired several shotgun rounds into it until it exploded. I was able to open the doors and use my pass codes to escape to the lobby. From there I found the garage and stole a Humvee. I fled the facility at a good clip.

                Evidently I tripped some alarm, because the army jeeps appeared behind me pretty quickly. They didn’t even try to warn me before they started shooting. I spawned some duplicates to give them hell, then turned back to flat desert stretching away ahead of me. Then, suddenly, the end of the car dipped and began to wheel back and forth. The blown tire began to cut into the ground. I had an idea. Almost entirely on impulse, I picked up Fluffy, ripped his collar off, and chucked him out the window. What happened next is pretty hard to explain.   I think I’d best explain it as simply the worst thing that I’ve ever seen. The shock wave slammed into the truck from behind, turning it over. I got thrown around the inside of the truck like a ragdoll. Behind me, I saw the other trucks getting sent flying by the detonating cat.    My head hit the steering column with a hard, meaty sound and everything stopped.

I woke up in a hospital bed. An extraordinarily pissed-looking cat was sitting on my chest, boring holes into my head. I reached out hesitantly to pet it. It bit me. Behind it, the major came into focus. I sucked on my finger, blinked, and said,

                “Where?”

                “Hospital. You’ll be court-martialed, of course, but I think we can avoid the treason charge, given what you’ve helped us make a valuable discovery.”

                He nodded out a window behind him, and I stared, slack-jawed at what I saw covering the desert of Afghanistan.

                “Oh fuck-“

                “-All of Afghanistan is like that. Totally brilliant. By the time the effect stopped, the whole county was affected. The Taliban soldiers are now claiming that we are literally Satan. The enemy moral dropped so low after the third day that most of them have either killed themselves or surrendered. We won.”

                He grinned largely.

                “Never would have occurred to any sane person to do it, but it’s great. We started airdropping aid packages into the villages who surrender. I’m told that inside a year, the blood and meat will have tremendously increased the fertility of the soil. Removing all the hair will be a problem, though.”

                I stared blankly at the wall, then turned to the cat, who was attempting to eat my boots.

                “And Fluffy?”

                “We keep extras.”

                I nodded, closing my eyes. I felt the regulator band on my arm. I found the little black button.

                The major was ranting, bright-eyed. He seemed ecstatic.

                “This is the weapon of the future. Not cats, though, too hard to control. Birds, maybe. Yeah, pigeons, that’s it. Train them to fly into enemy territory, and detonate them. Why, we’ll be ruling the world inside the decade…”

Author's Note: I'm sorry about the title, I really am. I couldn't help myself. It's a sickness.

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Sorry to anyone who actually read this. Getting the adds to target on a site like this is... challenging.