But they betrayed us.

  Liars.

  Aliens.

  I saw movement in one of the buildings and shot off a few bursts from my weapon. The façade cracked and wept brown sap. Everything was alive in their cities, even the buildings. Everything bled. But I didn’t see any aliens, just us in our boots.

  We crawled over that place, looking for the enemy. But the city was deserted. Maybe they’d abandoned it, or they’d found out we were coming and hid in bunkers. I don’t know.

  But we couldn’t just come all this way for nothing. We had to do what we came for. We had to be weapons.

  We assembled around the heart of the city’s square the way we planned in training. We raised our energy weapons and set them on the new setting, the one engineered specifically for this mission. We pointed our weapons across the broad square at one another. Set them at a high charge. Waited for the signal.

  I started to vibrate. We started to come apart.

  The trick was to wait, to be patient. But no one had actually tried to use the light like this before, no living person. It was something they’d done with simulators and robots that fired at each other. It’s easy for a robot, to fire at another robot. Harder for a soldier to fire at the person next to them. The one you’d take a hit for. I’d fire into my own face first, I thought, when they told me what we had to do.

  But we’re the Light Brigade. We do what they tell us to do.

  The vibrating got worse. Then the cramping. My body seized up. I gasped. Somebody shot their weapon; too soon. A scream. A body down. Another shot. Too soon.

  Goddammit, hold it together.

  The contraction stopped.

  The world snapped.

  I didn’t look at the mirrored helmet of the soldier across from me. I looked at the purple patch on their suit, the one that said they were one of us, the Light Brigade. I pulled the trigger.

  Everything burst apart.

  We were full of light.

  ***

  “I’m tired of taking care of living things,” my CO told me once outside the mess hall, right before that operation. “There’s so goddamn many of you. I can’t even go home and take care of my dog at night without getting angry at it. Too much fucking responsibility.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “For what? It’s not your fault. The war’s not your fault. Not my fault either.” But she said the last part differently, like she didn’t quite believe it.

  And I wondered if she was right to doubt it, because it was our fault, wasn’t it? We fought this war willingly. We gave our bodies to it, even if we’re only here because of the lies the corproations told us. What if there was a war and nobody came? What if the corporations voted for a war and nobody fought it? You can only let so many people starve. You can only throw so many people in jail. You can only have so many executions for insubordination to the latest CEO or Board of Directors.

  We are the weapon.

  We fired on one another as we broke apart, and created an explosion so massive it obliterated half the northern hemisphere.

  Everything the aliens made grow again, we turned back into dust.

  We were the weapon. We were the light.

  That was when it changed, for me. It’s like, you think you’re brave, so you carry out your orders. You do it even if you know what the outcome is going to be. You do it because you always wanted to be a hero – you wanted to be on the side of the light. It’s not until you destroy everything good in the world that you realize you’re not a hero…you’re just another villain for the empire.

  ***

  There weren’t many of us left to see what we did, and maybe it was better that way. It was all over the networks, the destruction of half a continent. They didn’t say how we did it. They didn’t say we shot each other up to do it, or say how many of our people died in the explosion, their essential elements broken apart. And right beside these pictures of this barren, smoking wasteland were pictures of our own people cheering in our dingy little cities built on the bones of our ancestors. We had scorched the fucking earth, but everyone cheered because we’d gotten back at those aliens, those liars, those betrayers.

  I saw those images and I knew what I had to do. Because I still wanted to be a hero. I still had a chance. But it meant giving up everything I believed in. Betraying everyone I cared about. Being everything I’m supposed to hate.

  I know what I need to do because I’ve seen it.

  A white rose on a black table.

  Heaps of bodies lying on the field like hay.

  I know where I need to go. I know what’s next.

  ***

  The CO gave us leave, those of us who were left. I spent mine looking up the city from my vision, the one I saw in transit. There are a lot of cities by water, but none of ours have brilliant green fields like that. All of our shining cities are surrounded by gritty labor camps.

  I didn’t realize how much they lied to us on the networks until I saw the alien cities. Until I killed the aliens myself. They had made a beautiful world from our shit, and we hated them for it, because they were free. No one owned them.

  Betrayers, they said, on the networks. Liars.

  They had made the land grow things again, but that was all they were supposed to do. They weren’t supposed to be free because no one is free, and they weren’t supposed to be able to defend themselves because no one can. When we found out they could fight back, when we found out about the organic kites that could take out a drone with a single shattering note, or the EMPs that disabled our networks the first time one of our armies rolled by to see what they were doing, the corporate media started building the narrative – the aliens were liars standing in the way of corporate freedom of commerce.

  And then San Paulo.

  In San Paulo, the aliens had retaliated. They had turned everyone into light.

  A whole city had disappeared.

  What nobody said is that San Paulo was where the corporations kept a lot of their most profitable labor camps. My cousin was there, so far in debt to the corps that she couldn’t get out. I joined the Light Brigade so that wouldn’t be my fate, too. The corps take care of you, as long as you give them everything.

  Maybe the aliens did those people a favor. Now that I’d been light, I started thinking that maybe they didn’t die after all. Maybe they just went somewhere else. Maybe the aliens found out what we were, too, and tried to save us from ourselves, the way I was now trying to save them.

  The San Paulo Blink showed the corporations what was possible. And they used the tech to fight back.

  The aliens gave us the light.

  Eight million corporate slaves, gone in a blink.

  And our response: half a continent scorched of all life.

  Maybe the light was our downfall. Or maybe we’d been falling the whole time.

  ***

  After a couple days’ leave, after I located the coordinates of where the city in my vision used to be, I asked to go out on the next offensive. The city I’d seen in my vision had been one of the first we destroyed in the early days of the war, after we tried to invade and they retaliated. In the archives, I saw the city the same way I had in my vision: heaps of our bodies on the green grass fields all around the city.

  In the here-and-now, we were still looking for rogue aliens, trying to find out what had happened to all of them, but I already knew. I wasn’t there to help them clean up. I was there because I wanted to jump with them.

  I could blink forward. And now I knew I could blink back.

  My CO gave me a look when I made the request, like she was trying to figure out if I was crazy. She told me that if I could pass the psych eval, she’d approve my next drop. I asked her if she ever gave her dog away, because it was too much responsibility.

  “My dog’s dead,” she said.

  “That makes it easier,” I said.

  “No,” she said. “It doesn’t. But I guess you can’t save everything.”

  No, I thought, you have to choose.

  I almost turned back, then, but I was too committed. Escalation of commitment.

  The shrink asked me a lot of questions, but I knew the ones that mattered.

  “So do you still think you can travel in time, when you become light?” she asked.

  I laughed. “I haven’t had any of that déjà vu since the last drop. Those aliens are dead. It’s over.”

  I passed my evaluation.

  I prepared for the drop. Closed my eyes. Held onto my sense of self while everyone else broke up around me. I pictured the city in my head, the place I wanted to go back to.

  We broke apart.

  And I saw it – I saw the alien city of my vision again surrounded by brilliant green fields. The shining spires. The inland sea. It wasn’t the city we had scorched when we became the weapons– though it was just as surely obliterated in the here-and-now as that city was. This was the capital. The center of everything. Those spires were their ships, grounded forever at the foot of the gleaming sea. I had arrived before our first offensive on this city, before the fields were full of the bodies of our people. Before we knew the aliens could fight back.

  I came down into my own body, trying to yank myself together, but it was like trying to put together a bucket full of puzzle pieces as somebody poured it out around you.

  There were no bodies yet. I had time.

  I skimmed into the city, past crowds of startled onlookers. I still wasn’t fully corporeal, but I was getting there. I needed a few more minutes. I needed to tell them. Just as I was able to draw air into my lungs, I felt my body vibrating again. It wanted so badly to come back apart and go where the people in charge had sent it.

  I held it together.

  I yelled, “They’re sending us. We’re weapons. We’re going to scorch the whole continent.”

  They all stared blankly at me, like I was some dumb beast, and I wondered if they understood Spanish. I tried again in English, but that was as many languages as I knew.

  When I didn’t say anything else, the crowds dispersed and the people went on their way.

  But one of them came up behind me, and I recognized her. It was the bag lady from the restaurant. She put her hand on my arm and squeezed, but it went right through me. I was coming apart again.

  “It’s you who brings the light,” she said. “We won’t be here when it comes. You can do what you need to do now without fear for us.”

  I broke apart.

  Saw nothing. A wall of blackness.

  Then, another city.

  But not the one my CO had sent me to. Someplace else. I was skipping out of control. I was losing it.

  I knew this city because I had grown up here, before it became a work camp. I was eight years old now, staring into the lights of San Paulo. The ocean wasn’t as close as it is now, but I could smell the sea on the wind.

  I knew this place, and this day.

  My cousin was with me, young and alive, laughing at some joke.

  I wanted her to be safe forever. I wanted us all to be safe.

  I stared up at the sky. Mars was up there, full of socialists.

  But they hadn’t lied to us after all, had they?

  It was my lie. My betrayal.

  I held out my hand to my cousin. “Have you ever wanted to become the light? Go anywhere you want? Be anyone you want?”

  “It’s impossible to be anyone you want,” she said, and I was sad, then, for how soon the corporations took away our dreams.

  “Hold my hand tight,” I said. “There’s going to be a war soon. There’s going to be a war, but no one will come.”

  That’s why the aliens weren’t in the city when we arrived with our weapons.

  It was because of me. My betrayal.

  And so was this.

  I blinked.

  I was high above the city now, still in San Paulo, but the sea was higher, the sprawl was even greater, and I could see the work camps circling the city one after another after another.

  Eight million people.

  What if there was a war and nobody came?

  I broke apart over San Paulo.

  I was a massive wave of energy, disrupting the bodies around me, transforming everything my altered atoms touched.

  We became eight million points of light.

  I broke them all apart, and brought them with me.

  You can’t save them all. But I could save San Paulo. I could take us all…someplace else, to some other time, where there’s no war, and the corporations answer to us, and freedom isn’t just a soundbite from a press release.

  This is not the end. There are other worlds. Other stars. Maybe we’ll do better out there. Maybe when they have a war here again, no one will come.

  Maybe they will be full of light.

  * * *

  Kameron Hurley is the Hugo-award winning author of the God’s War Trilogy and The Mirror Empire. Hurley’s short fiction has appeared in magazines including Lightspeed, Vice Magazine’s Terraform, EscapePod, and Strange Horizons, as well as anthologies such a The Lowest Heaven, Year’s Best SF and the upcoming Meeting Infinity. Hurley writes a regular column for Locus Magazine and has had nonfiction pieces in The Atlantic and Uncanny Magazine. Empire Ascendant, Hurley’s latest novel, is now available from Angry Robot Books.

  The Light Brigade was previously published in Lightspeed magazine (2015).

  Declaration

  by James Patrick Kelly

  “When in the course of human events ...”

  As Silk spoke, fluffy clouds formed the phrase in a Magritte sky, which was simultaneously noon and dusk. While Remeny could appreciate the control Silk had over his softtime domain, she wished he wouldn’t steer their meeting in an artsy direction. They had work to do.

  “Wait,” said Botão, “what about we the people?”

  “That’s the other one,” Silk shot her a (.1) anger blip fading to (.7) irritation. “The Constitution.”

  “But we’re the people we’re talking about,” Botão ignored Silk’s blippage. “That’s the whole point?”

  “Human events,” said Silk. “If you’d wait just a second, I’m getting to the people part.”

  Botão had only been assigned to their school coop team for a month now and Remeny knew what she did not: Silk didn’t like to be challenged, especially not in his own domain. They had chosen his corner of virtuality because Silk had enough excess capacity to host them all, but his was not the ideal place to plot their pretend revolution. The opening words of the Declaration of Independence were going wispy above them.

  “Get on with it then,” said Sturm. “And skip the special effects.”

  “When in the course of human events,” Silk said, “it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another …”

  “Okay,” said Botão.

  “… and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”

  The four others—Remeny, Sturm, Botão and Toybox—scanned each other and then turned on Silk. They had agreed to close all private channels and keep their avatars emotionally transparent, so the air filled with blips of confusion and disapproval.

  “Laws of Nature?” said Toybox. “What the hell is that about?”

  “Maybe relativity.” Sturm’s scorn blip started at (.3) and climbed.

  “They didn’t even have relativity back then.”

  “They did, they were just too stupid to realize it.”

  “Mankind? What about the other fifty-two percent?” Botão was laughing now. “And who is nature’s god?”

  “Exactly,” said Sturm. “I call bullshit. Crusty oldschool bullshit.”

  Remeny kept quiet; she focused on Silk, who was waiting for them to calm down. “Agreed,” he said. “But it will mean something to the old people because Thomas Jefferson wrote this stuff.”

  “Who’s he and so what?” said Toybox.

  “Jefferson as in Jefferson County,” said Remeny. “As in where we live.”

  “I live in softtime.” At (.9+), Toybox’s rage was nearly unreadable—but then he was always shouting. “That’s where I live.”

  Silk waved a hand in front of his face, as if the blip was a bad smell. “History is important to reality snobs,” he said. “This gets their attention.”

  Remeny noticed that he was keeping his temper in check. She was definitely interested in Silk; poise was something she looked for in a boyfriend.

  “So will making their lights flicker,” said Toybox. This was why he had flunked one coop already. “Crashing their flix.”

  “We’re not talking about anything like that,” said Botão. “We’re students, not terrorists.”

  “Speak for yourself.” Sturm spread his hands and between them appeared an oldschool clock. “Revolutions don’t play by the rules.” Its face showed two minutes to midnight.

  Remeny couldn’t believe Sturm, of all people, aligning himself with terrorists. She agreed with Botão; she didn’t really care about the revolution. All she wanted was to get a grade for her senior cooperative, graduate and never log on to the Jefferson County Educational Oversight Service again. The problem was that a third of her grade for coop was for contribution to the team’s cooperative culture. The senior coop was supposed to demonstrate to the EOS that students had the social skills to succeed in softtime by coming together anonymously to plan and execute a project that had hardtime outcomes. .

  Of course, anonymity wasn’t easy in a county like Jefferson. Students spent hours in soft and hardtime trying to figure out who was who. Botão, for example, was one of the refugees from Brazil and probably lived in Tugatown. Remeny had first met her two years ago in the EOS playgrounds, mostly ForSquare and Sanctuary. Now Botão was Sturm’s friend too – maybe even his girlfriend. Toybox defied the rules of anonymity by dressing his avatar in clothes that pointed to hardtime identity. Everyone knew that he was the Jason Day whose body was stashed in bin 334 of the Komfort Kare body stack on Route 127 in Pineville. Unfortunately for him, no one cared. Bad luck to have him on the team—if he was going to be such a shithead, they might all flunk. Good luck, though, to get Silk—whoever he was. The avatar was new to the senior class, but Silk didn’t act new. She thought maybe he was a duplicate of some rich kid they already knew. It cost to be in two places at once and considering how crush his domain was, Remeny guessed Silk had serious money. Probably lived in that gated community at the lake. She wondered what he looked like in hardtime. His avatar was certainly hot in his leathers and tanker boots. Sturm’s identity, obviously, was no secret to her, although she hoped that she was the only one on the team who knew that he was her twin brother.