2021.07.21, near Española, NM
The sun slips reluctantly behind the only cloud in the sky like I’d put on a dress. Also like me, it’s never on for long. The wind steals the sun’s filmy shift, letting hot, naked rays toast my dusty skin. I doff my backpack. The breeze chills my sweaty armpits and raises goosebumps on my back. A lizard skitters, then watches me sit with the other members of patrol team Tango. I’ve shared a bed with each, some many times. Nobody stays long-term because nobody thinks long-term. Besides, Jade, the team leader, wouldn’t tolerate it, even if I did.
I uncap a bottle of filtered Rio Grande and wet my dry lips, tongue and throat. I dribble a drop onto a leaf and shove it toward the lizard. I turn my backpack so the side mesh pocket faces the sun. That’s where I keep a heart-shaped locket on a thin chain with tiny knots I can’t untie. The locket’s opalescent onyx surface gleams in the sunlight beaming through the mesh. Inside the locket, a little chip perpetually scribes 20 gigs of Wikipedia, copying from one micro-SD card to another, then back again. It’s been months since anyone could access Wikipedia, so it doesn’t say anything about the Gun. It may be out of date, but it’s still our library, our Alexandria.
The theory is that if a recalculation wipes out Wikipedia—someone Guns one of its founders or a key funder—parts of the copying in progress might survive the recalc. My locket and a few hundred others like it carried by Ft. Modis personnel could provide enough bits to rebuild some major Wiki-chunks.
The locket holds another SD card with backup copies of this journal and mnemonics that help me remember key bits of recent history. I’ve memorized the names of family, friends and classmates who have disappeared since the 3D-printable Gun showed up on Reddit in January. No one mentions the pandemic now that we’ve lost millions more. The Gun killed half and bullets and knives killed the other half in fights over food, water, gas and ammo as civilization disintegrated into warlords proving their fitness—or lack of it—in battles for survival.
The Gun taught us some new physics. We learned our space-time universe somehow spares natural memory when it recalculates history, but not digital memory. That’s why I write the histories—the original timeline and the recalcs we’ve seen—every time someone significant’s Gunned and we glitch out to a new reality. I also keep a list of people who’ve been taken out the old-fashioned way, often by their own fans, to ice their history so a Gunner can’t delete their work. That was the epitaph for Swift, Brady, Drake, Berners-Lee and at least a hundred more.
People started icing their heroes after someone Gunned a guy named Trump. He was president when we now have Edmond Garvey. The recalculation after Trump’s deletion didn’t change things much because Garvey and his backers pushed an agenda much like Trump’s. The biggest surprise of the recalc was that one of Trump’s kids—obviously not truly his—survived it. Her name’s different, of course, but people said her rise to fame as a porn star in our current history had nothing to do with her on-screen skills—it happened because people recognized her from before the recalc. That’s the rumor, anyway—our news comes from third-hand shortwave chatter. In another recalc surprise, Garvey somehow corralled his followers behind metric conversion—what he called a legacy project. Now, we’re all talking Celsius and kilometers.
Jade rises to her feet with the others—Amber, Pearl, Topaz. We avoid using real names since the Gun makes revenge by proxy a quick, clean, untraceable thing. If you want someone dead, just Gun down one of their parents. Jade doesn’t want to go back to the Fort empty-handed. “Get on your feet, Jet!”
“You made me team historian,” I say, buying a minute. My name is Tanya Kanard. I’m safe putting it here, cuz I’m adopted, and there’s no tracking down my bio-parents. I tried when my adoptive mom died old-school in February, killed by a gang raiding homes looking for loot. My dad disappeared from his Los Alamos job when things started unraveling. Not a peep since then. Most would call him abrasive, so someone he fired coming back and Gunning him is not just plausible, but probable.
I haven’t made real enemies, but the Gun makes you think about everyone you ever pissed off, so I’m almost never alone. If you want to come after me, you’ll have to fight the other Tangos, too.
Later…
We found two guys at a gas station just before turning back at sunset—long dead, nothing but clothes and bones. Mayor Cano was talking about repop now and Jade says, yeah, but we need more diversity, cuz we have only two scrawny flyweights. For Jade, I think diversity means taller, stronger men. About two hundred of us at Modis are fertile, of five hundred total, so our two captive princes get all the sex they want and some they don’t. Repop could be a waste of time. There’s nothing on the radio about it. Maybe people on the coasts are fine. Maybe everyone outside the U.S. is fine. They could all be gone. Anyway, Jade talked Mayor Cano into another mission, so I gotta sleep.
2021.07.23
We’re heading out for a castle raid. Not a real castle. Castle means any fortified place in the middle of nowhere so guards can see who’s approaching. We don’t have tall buildings around here, but a couple of stories up on hill gets a castle view, and that’s what we’re up against. We know there’s at least one guy, a warlord called Koth. I grab my M4, Gun, water and backpack. I usually feel charged up, but today I feel like shit. I vomit in the composting toilet, rinse my mouth and spit, then meet the Tangos in the motor pool.
We caravan to a rally point about five miles from the castle. Closer than that, they’ll see our cars on radar and thermal sensors. New Mexico may not have much, but it’s got lots of sunshine, so charging my phone and locket isn’t a problem for me. Powering cameras and autoguns isn’t a problem for warlords.
Until we’re up close, we’re only concerned about regular guns—the max range for a Deletion Gun is about 5 meters, and it takes several hours for a Gun’s coil to recharge. Nobody’s figured out how to speed that up, so folks crafted six-shooters that look like Dyson vacuum cleaners and are just as clunky to use. The Gun uses no ammunition and works at close range. A lot of skeptical young nerdy dudes discovered that when they assembled their freshly 3d-printed parts into a Star-Warsy blaster, then looked down the empty barrel and pulled the trigger. Correction: The makers didn’t discover anything. Their Guns erased them from history, along with all they did and made, including the Gun they just fired. It was the people who saw them vanish who spread the alarm on social media, when that was still a thing.
Police wanted to see a body, a birth certificate, a driver license or a photograph. Families had nothing but memories. From then on, almost every man and many women felt compelled to make or buy a Gun “for protection.” Armed with perfect murder weapons that left no evidence, no body and no mess, incels tilted odds in their favor by deleting rivals and exacting ultimate revenge on those who dared rebuff their interest.
Climbing the steep hillside is suicide—we can deal with prickly pear and cholla cacti, but not autoguns and land mines. Our Trojan horse is an electric tractor that hauls a tanker of water up from the river to augment the castle’s well supply, which can’t keep up with the greenhoused acreage feeding Koth’s tribe. Jade bribes the truck driver, promising a pick of the castle’s loot.
We stash everything but weapons and ammo in a clump of piñon trees, then climb inside the tank and find it’s full of baffle balls. Despite the baffles, water surges knock us around as the truck bumps up the road. We stop at two checkpoints along the way. At the second, the tank’s hatch opens. We take cover under the baffle balls; I keep my Gun holstered and my M4 aimed at the hatch. A guard leans in, shines a flashlight around, then closes the hatch too quickly, like she knew that if she’d paused, her blood would be the first spilled. Maybe she knows the Modis reputation—we take partners but not prisoners. Maybe she saw Topaz’s Gun and didn’t want her kids erased along with her. Maybe she just doesn’t give a shit what happens to Koth.
The driver signals all-clear by turning on the tanker’s pump. We climb out and slip to the ground. From there, the guards we encounter understand that when it’s five-on-one, defending Koth means death, and surrender means survival. We leave a trail of broken radios and gagged, zip-tied guards behind us, each sporting enough scrapes and bruises to support a claim of putting up a fight. In Koth’s main office, the two guards capitulate as soon as they see us; they follow Jade’s gestures and put their guns on the floor.
We zip-tie them, then Topaz and I cover Jade as she kicks Koth’s heavy door open. Gunshots echo as chest-high holes appear in the door. We fire back. Koth’s in full armor—he got a warning or caught us on surveillance cameras. A grenade sailing through the doorway tells me he doesn’t give a shit about his two guards. I heave one of the bound guards toward the grenade, then dive behind her. The explosion thumps me through her body. My ears ring as I follow Jade and Topaz into the office; Pearl and Amber cover our backsides. The tubular shapes on Koth’s shelves look familiar, but I keep my focus on him. He’s very tall, close to two meters, and thick, easily a hundred kilos. Imposing. Intimidating. He stands with a presence that says he gets things his way. We may need diversity, but we don’t need this.
Koth jerks as Jade fires two shots into his shoulder armor, way off center. She wants him alive. Stunned and gasping, he holds his rifle across his chest with his right hand. His left hand moves toward a grenade clipped to his chest. I aim a dozen centimeters southeast of the grenade and squeeze. As my spent cartridge pings on the floor, Koth’s hand slides off the grenade and hangs at an odd angle from his bleeding forearm. He lets his rifle clatter to the floor, then cradles his maimed left arm in his right.
The shapes around us filter into my consciousness: shelves and schematics of Deletion Guns—primitive-looking models I’ve never seen. Prototypes. As their meaning settles into my mind, I take the M4 in my left hand and draw my Gun with my right.
Koth uses his good hand to peel off his helmet and tactical goggles. “Tanya,” he says.
Jade and Topaz look at me, then back at him. He unfastens his armored vest and lets it hang open, bracketing a belly bigger than I remember. Jade unclips Koth’s grenade and secures it to her belt.
I gesture at the prototypes and schematics. “Dad…you made the Gun? You put it on Reddit?”
He looks down, nods, then looks at the ceiling, never at me. “I’ve almost got a shield working!” His voice cracks on “working.”
I raise both the Gun and my M4 to his face.
“Jet, no!” yells Jade. “If you Gun him, you go, too!”
I won’t go with him because I’m adopted, but erasing the Gun’s inventor and its terrible history will put me in huge recalc with a million unknowns and no adopting father—at least, not this one. Pulling the other trigger will keep the status quo: me and my Tango team with a castle of loot.
I pull a trigger. Your history will tell you which one.