“That’s a bunker. Pretty old by the looks of it. Must’ve been some Russians holed up to get away from the bombs last century or at the beginning of this one.”
“I’m going. Think you can get me part of the way there?”
“By yourself? No way.”
“I noticed your six-legger out front is armored.”
“Yeah, it’s got a cannon. I forget how many millimeters. That’s an armed transport-use coolie goat.”
“Then I’ll need two days worth of food in bags on that thing. If you can get a truck to carry me and the goat as far as the road goes, that’ll be fine.”
“What about contracted security?”
“Won’t need it.”
“Then you’ll be taking a one-way trip. I can’t stand by and watch you do that.”
Uwe was a surprisingly considerate man. I clapped him on the shoulder. “You wanted me to admit it, so here goes. This is a very personal mission for me. An extremely private mission.”
“We’re talking about your life here. I don’t care how private your reasons are.”
“No, we’re talking about the life of every admedistration civilian in the world. Compared to that, I’m nothing at all. Remember what Stauffenberg said, the fate of the world is on my shoulders. This is something I need to pull off on my own.”
Uwe stared at me for a moment, not really buying my story. Then, at last, he shrugged. “You really do think about nothing other than yourself, do you?”
“That’s right. Like you said, I’m very serious about this. And yeah, I don’t give a shit what happens to the world.”
“That’s not very constructive of you, but I can’t say I disapprove. Hey, I’m mostly in this job for the beer and the smokes myself.”
Uwe put a hand to his ear and began talking to someone.
“Yuri? Hello? Uwe here. I need someone to carry a woman and a transport goat up into the mountains. Yeah, right away.”
03
I could feel the wind growing colder against my skin with every gain in elevation.
It was just me and the six-legged goat in the back of the truck. The goat had been put together to army specs, so no pink was involved. Everything was drab olive, smoky, dirty— the colors of war. I had been told that the six-legger’s control mechanism consisted of cultivated horse nerves specially trained for the environment. The original horse came from local stock, so they were used to the mountains, Uwe said. It bore a Geneva Convention Forces stencil on its amply armored side. There were cultivated parts, muscles extracted from an actual mountain goat, and a complex network of machinery, making it impossible to tell whether it was more biological or mechanical.
The goat had no head, and it would have taken considerable imagination to call the sensors bristling from its front end a face. The closest I could get to making sense of it was to think of it as a mountain goat with its head lopped off.
We went rocking and swaying up the mountain road for some time, but not once did the driver look back to talk to me. Not that I would have been able to respond, not knowing Russian. I was beginning to feel a strange affinity for my cybernetic companion when the truck came to a lurching stop.
The back opened, and the driver was standing outside, motioning me to exit. I gave the goat a slap on the rump and it stood smoothly under its heavy load and hopped down onto the gravelly path. I scanned an aerial photograph of our surroundings linked to the GPS in my AR. It would take a half day or more from here to reach the bunker site. There was hardly a path at all, but my high-resolution satellite imagery would make the going relatively painless. I waved to the driver and thanked him. He went back down the road without a word.
I was now thoroughly in the mountains. The rocky face of the Caucasus was black. According to Uwe, the name came from a Greek mutation of an ancient Scythian word meaning “white snow.” Chechnya was to the north of the mountains, and our truck was now near the top of the range, close to the Georgian border to the south. The only snow on the Caucasus was at the peaks. Below 2,500 meters there was only black rock and dirt.
I started to navigate my way up the rocky slope, the goat deftly picking its way along behind me. I felt like a mountain ascetic on his way to meet the gods, though as soon as I had the thought, I banished it from my mind. I didn’t think of—I didn’t want to think of—Miach as a god.
There were no clouds. The humidity was low, but the sun didn’t feel too hot as of yet. Despite the lack of a path, this was where the Chechen guerrillas had made their home, and I didn’t find the going terribly difficult. I could feel the air in my lungs growing thinner as I climbed. A lack of oxygen wasn’t something even WatchMe and a subdermal medcare unit could fix. I had gone off-line some time ago for that matter. My AR was a local simulation, working off the GPS I carried.
“Being this alone is actually kind of exciting,” I said to the goat.
The goat plodded along in silence.
After three hours in the trackless wilderness, I found something resembling a proper path. According to my navigator, I had another six hours of this before I reached my destination. The path was fairly wide—I even saw traces of tire tracks. Probably left by the Russians during earlier conflicts in the region.
Every once in a while I rested to fill my mouth with water and acclimatize to the air. The transport goat had its own recycler unit embedded, so it didn’t require much in the way of drink. I touched his back, as though it were a pet. It wasn’t all that different from a regular animal. The skin was warm beneath a layer of fur. I had seen a civilian militia charge an army riding on these once, though I had forgotten whether it was in Niger or some other part of Africa.
The army in that conflict had been comprised entirely of remote surrogates. The militia had set off an electromagnetic pulse in the area, cutting the connection between the command center and the surrogates and forcing them to enter automated battle mode. Faced with a completely unexpected cybernetic cavalry charge, the surrogate troops had been decimated.
My goat was a slightly different beast than the ones they had ridden on, mine having been specially engineered for transporting goods in these mountains. The machine gun turret had been added on almost as an afterthought, and frankly I didn’t really see the point. I stood, returned my canteen to its sack on the goat’s back, checked the pistol in the holster at my side, and resumed my ascent.
Climb. Rest. Climb. Rest. Even as I grew used to the air, I could feel my stamina failing. This was a natural sensation that came with a reduction in oxygen—a physical symptom that my internal medcare plant couldn’t hide by tweaking my nervous system as it did with pain and other discomfort. Proof that I was alive.
As history marched on, the range of natural experiences considered acceptable in life had shrunk. Where, I wondered, does one draw the line? Why form a wall around the soul or human consciousness? We had already conquered most natural diseases. We had elevated the myth of a normalized human body to a high public standard.
My thoughts drifted while I climbed.
Take diabetes, for example. In its original form, diabetes was a feature humans had developed that helped to deal with cold climates. Water with glucose has a freezing point below zero—beneficial for people faced with the sudden onset of cold temperatures. Even if the sugar destroyed your veins and your kidneys, you’d still live a decade or two, and if you managed to reproduce during that time it was a big win for your DNA. Diabetes was a vital part of our slipshod evolution.
Qualities that were vital in some circumstances became useless or even dangerous when those circumstances changed. We are just collections of DNA optimized for particular places and times. The human genome was a patchwork of solutions for a thousand different problems. It was easy to think of evolution as meaning forward progress, when in reality we, and all living things, were just assorted attempts at survival.