The Always War (18 page)

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.

But the computer system acted like I might know something valuable too,
Tessa thought.
What could that be?

She looked again at Gideon, really trying to see him this time. Even in the dim light Tessa could tell that his uniform was stained and ripped beyond repair. His blond hair was clumped with grease and sweat and dirt and blood. He had dark circles under his eyes, cuts and bruises across his face. He looked even worse than all the people she’d been used to seeing back home in Waterford City. Was this really the same person she’d worshipped up on the stage in the city auditorium, glowing in his spotless white uniform?

How much of that viewpoint had been colored by Tessa wanting him to be the hero, the angel, the saint?

It wasn’t true,
she thought.
It was never true.

But wasn’t it worth something that he’d
thought
he was protecting his country? That he was capable of sitting at a computer for twelve hours straight, day after day after day, trying so hard, because he thought that was the right thing to do?

He was capable of killing people too,
Tessa reminded herself.
He thought that was what he’d done.

And then he’d regretted it, and tried to figure out a way to make amends.

Gideon was too complicated to think about.

Tessa looked at Dek instead.

From the very beginning, when Dek had rolled out of the airplane closet, Tessa had been in awe of her—Dek, the genius street kid, the miniature tough who could fly a plane better than a military pilot and figure out how to get fuel from tanks
abandoned more than seventy-five years ago. Dek always knew how to take care of herself.

And yet here she was, sobbing, her heart broken all over again now that she knew her parents had devoted their entire working lives—and lost their lives—to a pointless cause. Now that she thought that their deaths hadn’t meant anything.

Dek was complicated too.

What if it’s the same way with the computer system?
Tessa thought.
What if we’re only seeing one side of its personality, and we need to see all the complications to really understand?

But that was silly. Computer systems didn’t have personalities. They could be complex—a system controlling the entire military would have to be—but they still had to be logical. As the computer itself had told Tessa and Gideon and Dek, computers could only do what they were programmed to do.

Tessa jerked back, every bit as jolted as if she’d just been struck by lightning. What had the computer voice’s exact words been? Hadn’t it told them what had been guiding it all along?

We can only do what we’re programmed to do. I was programmed to …

Why couldn’t Tessa remember? They’d been talking about why a computer couldn’t be a traitor, why the computer’s lies about the war fit with its goals, why the computer had to stop humanity from destroying itself …

Tessa remembered.

I was programmed to find a way to win the war.

“Gideon! Dek!” Tessa exclaimed, sitting fully upright now. “I figured it out! The computer system
wanted
us to know the
secret! It was helping us all along! Because … because that’s the way to win the war!”

Dek’s angry scowl gained an edge of confusion. Gideon barely grunted.

“Didn’t you hear me?” Tessa asked.

“Most people trying to win a war,” Dek muttered, “would start by really using the bombs they build!”

“No, no!” Tessa said. “The computer system told us why that wouldn’t work. It would have led to total destruction of the planet.
Nobody
wins, that way. The sides were too evenly matched, or the weapons were too terrible, or something like that. I’m not a military strategist. I don’t know the exact reasons. But the computer system knows what it’s doing!”

“By counting on three kids? When it’s already got the world’s best military at its disposal?” Gideon snarled. “You didn’t even know what the war was about! Dek didn’t even care enough to go to the military academy when she was chosen for it!”

“When I got the notice the day after my father died?” Dek asked. “What would
you
have done?”

Tessa put a hand out in each direction, in case she had to hold Gideon and Dek apart.

“Exactly!” she said. “We’re not just three random kids. Gideon’s a talented military pilot—a
potential
military hero—who sees why the killing was wrong. Er—would have been wrong, I mean. And Dek is someone who has every reason to understand why even this fake war is bad for our country.”

“And you?” Dek challenged.

“I guess … I guess because I read all those books, I’m
someone who knows what was good about humanity before the war,” Tessa said, frowning slightly, because she didn’t really see why the computer system would have wanted her along. Maybe there hadn’t been a reason for her to be included. It had just happened.

“You’re someone who holds on to hope,” Gideon said softly. “No matter what.”

For a moment Tessa thought he was going to sit up and agree with her about everything. He could talk Dek into helping too.

But he only began shaking his head, even as he kept lying flat on the floor, staring up at the bars that locked them in.

“It’s an admirable trait,” Gideon went on. “But the thing is, there
isn’t
any hope in this situation. The computer system let the guards find us and arrest us. We’re trapped in here. There’s nothing we can do.”

“We can tell the guards the truth,” Tessa said. “We can tell them what the war zone’s really like. We can tell everyone who gets near our cell!”

She started to scramble up, but that just brought back the poking sensation beside her stomach.

“We already tried to tell General Kantoff what we saw in the war zone,” Gideon said. “He just thought we were crazy. That’s what anybody would think!”

“Then we show them the same proof we saw,” Tessa said, crouching half up and half down on one knee.

“We don’t
have
that proof anymore,” Dek said. “It’s all back in the control room.”

“And we don’t have anything to communicate with,
anyhow,” Gideon added glumly. “If the computer system really wanted us to fix all this, wouldn’t it have left us something to work with?”

Tessa shifted positions, which only intensified the poking sensation. Something seemed to be in her pocket.

She remembered what it was.

“We
do
have something to work with,” she said. She began pulling circuits and wires out of her pocket. “The computer system didn’t let the guards in until after I shoved the miniature laptop in my pocket. It’s in pieces now, but—you two can put them back together, can’t you?”

Tessa held out a whole handful of computer parts.

Gideon sat up and looked.

“We can,” he said softly.

Dek was looking too. Her eyes were very wide.

“And we will,” she said.

They went back to the control room.

It turned out that the collection of broken pieces Tessa had in her pocket were enough to spring them from their prison cell, tap into an outlet for the whole computer system, schedule the guards to stay away from them, and set an open path to get back to talk to the computer voice.

Now Dek was arguing with the computer.

“You could have made this a lot easier for us,” she scolded. “Having us arrested … knocked out … imprisoned …”

“I needed to be sure you had enough resolve to carry this through,” the computer voice said. “I knew Gideon was smart enough to sneak out of his mother’s apartment past all the military officials watching him. Smart enough to hack into the Waterford City central grid and turn off the lights and cameras
in the areas he needed to walk through. Smart enough to find a way to fly into the war zone and back again. But what was really driving him? Did he want to make amends more than he wanted to die? Without the war, was he capable of having any higher goals?”

“Yes,” Gideon said. Oddly, he was looking at Tessa as he spoke.

Dek rolled her eyes.

“Okay, okay, spare us the morality lessons,” Dek said scornfully. “We don’t need to hear what you were testing me and Tessa for.”

Actually, Tessa wouldn’t have minded finding that out. But—well, maybe she already knew.

Dek was still talking.

“Why does it matter what we do?” she asked the computer. “Why do you even need us? If you thought it was best to admit that the whole war was fake, why didn’t you and the Westam central computer just tell everyone years ago? Why didn’t you pile a bunch of officials onto an airplane and send
them
into the war zone to see it all for themselves?”

“Because all my projections showed that wouldn’t work,” the voice said, almost a whisper now. “Anything I did on my own—or even with the Westam computer—all of that would be seen as a malfunction. I would have been shut down instantly, before I had a chance to explain. You kids—you’re more believable.”

Gideon frowned, even as he smoothed down his hair. On their way to the control room he’d detoured past a closet with spare uniforms, so he was back in sparkling, pristine white and gold.

But he still had dirt and blood caked in his hair, and if anything the bruises on his face had gotten darker.

He looked like a hero who hadn’t had time to recover from his wounds.

“General Kantoff didn’t believe us,” Gideon growled. “You could tell—he didn’t even think for a moment about the possibility that we might be telling the truth.”

“The generals are going to be the hardest ones to convince,” the computer voice said patiently. “You think you’ve spent
your
whole life on the war? They have too—and that’s been forty, fifty, sixty years of believing lies are true.”

“That’s why we have to tell everyone all at once,” Tessa said. “The entire country. And Westam, too.”

This was the plan they’d come up with: a broadcast to the entire continent. Tessa found that she remembered enough about TV and radio waves to imagine their news floating out everywhere, into the dark corners of Waterford City, across the empty stretches of the war zone, into the foreign cities of the enemy.

And what would happen then? Would people cheer and dance in the streets?

Or would they be angry? Would they feel cheated, learning that everything they’d devoted their lives to for more than seventy-five years was all a scam?

“What if this starts a real war?” Dek asked nervously. “What if Westam starts sending real bombers over here, and we start sending real bombers over there? I mean, if there’s not enough water for everyone—”

“There was always enough water,” the voice said
scornfully. “People just didn’t want to share.” The computer made a sound like a sigh. “The Westam system and I won’t let anyone start a real fight immediately after your announcement. We’ll have everything locked down. All the weapons, all the bombs. But eventually it will be possible to override our controls…. You’ll have to be very convincing. You’ll have to make it so that the majority of the people in each country want peace.”

Is that possible?
Tessa wondered.

She remembered the little boys back on the dirt pile behind her apartment building, the way they already wanted to fight even at five or six or seven years old.

The way she herself had wanted to beat them up. Had tried to, even.

What if humans are just going to be at war, no matter what? What if it’s better if we can all just believe the war is going on, and nobody gets killed for real?

But Dek’s parents had been killed by the fake war. Tessa’s parents had had their dreams and hopes dashed by a society that poured everything into the war, and nothing into even replacing lightbulbs.

And what about Gideon?
Tessa thought.
He’s been told his whole life that it’s right to kill, that he had to—and yet, somehow, something deep inside him objected to that….

Tessa was thinking so hard that she missed hearing what the others were talking about.

“I agree,” Dek was saying now, nodding at Gideon.

“What?” Tessa asked, looking around, bewildered. “What are you agreeing on?”

“We’ve got the whole broadcast system ready to go,” Gideon said, stepping back from something that Tessa guessed was an improvised camera. “We just agreed that you should be the first person to talk.”

“
Me
?” Tessa said, so surprised that her voice squeaked.

“You,” Gideon said. “Because you’re the one who got us here.”

Oh, no,
Tessa wanted to say.
I didn’t put the miniature laptop back together. I didn’t program any computers. I didn’t fly the airplane. I can’t even walk around my own city without getting lost.

But Gideon stopped her before she could object.

“You’re the one who had the will to get here,” he said. “The one who always held on to hope.”

I didn’t always have hope,
Tessa wanted to say.
I just always
wanted
to have hope. And I’m stupid. I’m not good at anything. I’m just a gnat. A flea. A slug.

But she wasn’t. She was a human—for better or for worse.

Gideon was already pointing the camera in her direction.

Tessa took a deep breath. She gave a fleeting thought to wondering why
she
hadn’t bothered combing her hair, as Gideon had. And then she decided it didn’t matter.

“Several weeks ago I went to an awards ceremony for a hero,” Tessa began. “I thought he was a hero because he’d fought in the war. It turned out that that wasn’t exactly true. It was true, though, that he was a hero.”

Through the haze of lights directed at her, Tessa saw Gideon jerk back in surprise. She smiled at him—and smiled at everyone in her country, everyone in the enemy’s country.