Wing Gypsies


He came from a long line of fighters. He had eyes in the back of his head, not like the ones in front, which were really conscious and registering a high resolution image. The other was like a security camera which connected to emotion, reading the surroundings, and if there was danger, focusing in and taking a look. With this faculty he could slip beyond the range of his ordinary senses. "I don't know how it works," he admitted, "but it does."

The way it worked was that it was thinking from the second brain, the one down in the gut. The gut has a completely separate process, so that it is a brain in and of itself, operating independently of the brain in the head. Very little of this brain's thinking ever makes it to consciousness because nobody wants to know what it thinks. It is locked away in the cellar so that nobody will see it. It is far from God in his heaven. It makes life and death decisions.

There wasn't time for calculations in fighting. The decisions had to be made instantly, without lag between decision and execution. Being a Fighter had become more like dancing than being the operator of a technological system. Decisions were made inside the fighter's nervous system, specifically, in the gut brain. He could look back at a battle and see what decisions he'd made, but he couldn't see it ahead of time or during the action. The art of war had evolved at breathtaking speed, and had taken a lot of breath away. It had become more like hunting for sport than anything resembling a fair fight, with the Empire the gentleman sportsman, and the season open when he said it was open.

The development of vaporizer technology had been the most significant advance since the gun. Killing at a distance had been perfected. A drone aircraft could watch an area and locate a suspect, then fire a smart bullet that would leave his body a smoking afterthought. But regardless of the accuracy, there were public relations problems because of the gore and blood. People who had known the body as a living thing would become emotional and angry and make threats against the Empire. Then they would have to be targeted, too. Sometimes it was necessary to kill entire families, including all the cousins, which meant wiping out an entire tribal society. But, as the leaders explained, "They'd kill us if they got the chance."

Vaporizer technology changed all that. It didn't leave any recognizable remains, just ashes, the same as cremation. Relatives might stand over the spot where the vaporizer ray hit their loved one, but there was less emotional identification with the white chunks and powder scattered around the area. Anything with water in it had been instantly dehydrated and turned to gaseous form, which accounted for the awful smell in the air when people got hit by a vaporizer ray. "Oh, shit."

"That's right, lots of it."

"Don't breath until that cloud disperses."

At first it was assumed that the gasses from vaporized bodies just disappeared into the atmosphere like smoke or other forms of pollution. There was little awareness of the atmosphere as capable of sustaining forms of life invisible to the ordinary senses. But the phenomena which air travelers began to experience made the old flying saucer stories look tame. Suddenly, the existence of ghosts was no longer in question. They were everywhere, and, not limited to material existence, they were capable of outrageous unpredictability.

An airplane would fly through a cloud of body vapor and suddenly ghosts would appear in the cockpit, or the passenger cabin, in the form of Romanian gypsies dancing on the wings. It was especially harrowing for passengers to look out and see a crackling fire on the wing with gypsies playing guitars and concertinas around it. "Fire!" they would scream. "Fire!"

Which was precisely what the Fighter would scream to release a vaporizer ray, the firing controller operating on voice recognition software. This would cause the gypsies on the wing to begin running around comically, and finally pissing on the fire, which was also a ghost, and burning nothing but the peace of mind of the passengers.

As more and more bodies were vaporized by the Terrorism Task Force, which was in fact eliminating tribal people from valuable real estate, as had become customary in capitalistic society, the clouds began to be recognized as fields of awareness. They had no body, per se, but could manifest the appearance of bodies, like ghosts.

"This is nothing more than pollution," the Strategist had explained in his great work, "The Virtue of Even Greater Selfishness." He continued, "These entities have no body, and without a body they can't own real estate, which is why they appear as Gypsies. They are condemned to wander, lost souls searching for release. If we don't give them that release, their souls will never be freed."

From the fact that they could not own real estate was extrapolated the idea that the cloud gypsies were opposed to private ownership of property, which was one of the identifying characteristics of a terrorist. That the entire problem was a symptom of killing people with vaporizer rays got lost in the ideological debate, which consisted of a hired moderator allowing two opposing public relations people to argue. The idea was that by bringing on the opposing sides, they had achieved some level of objectivity. These moderators, having no intellectual grasp of the details of the arguments, treated a guest who was laying out a false argument exactly the same as one who had carefully attended to the facts pertinent to the issue. The prevailing observation became, "Nobody knows anything."

What everybody knew for sure, though, was that if you were branded a terrorist you could be vaporized with impunity as a threat to the Empire. This was largely an economic issue to the airlines industry and a security issue to the air force industry. Gypsies dancing around a fire on the wings of the planes, or showing up inside the cabin begging for change or stealing whiskey, were not good for business nor for the impression of invincible force.

"It's only a matter of time," the Secretary of War explained, "until these terrorists are going to find their way into a fighter, and scream 'fire' at the wrong moment, unleashing a vaporizer ray at innocent people." It was a specious argument as the voice recognition software was exactly calibrated to the voice of the Fighter, and only to the voice of the Fighter. But people were afraid, and that was enough to get them to back anything the Secretary of War wanted.

And so the Green Door was invented as a molecular scrambler, sort of like a paper shredder, to clean the atmosphere of the gypsy ghost clouds. The awareness field was pulled into the panel and scrambled so that it had no linearity, but was reduced to mathematical trash, to be funneled out of the atmosphere and into Space. It was only a modification to the frequency attenuators that made it amplify rather than destroy, at which point it became the centerpiece in some very trendy dance clubs, as well as a tool used by psychologists to re-attune people who could not relate.

The Fighter was assessing his order to go to Planet Janet and blast a Green Door with a vaporizer ray. It was counter intuitive, and he so reported. It was his job to stay tuned to the gut brain, because it knew things about which the head was clueless. The reply came from the Strategist: "I'm not asking you to blast the fucking thing, I'm telling you to blast it. Who's the top dog?"

"You are, sir," the Fighter said, and he moved to the frequency of Planet Janet, finding himself orbiting near the Collector Ship, in the slow lane. Because he was having to go against his instincts, the Fighter prepared himself for his probable death. If he disobeyed a direct order from the Strategist, his death would be certain. The power would be cut off to his systems, and he could say "Fire!" all day long, but his voice would no longer be recognized by the software. The plug would be pulled, and he'd be just another Joe.

Posted: Mon - August 27, 2007 at 07:30 PM