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“They’re drinking coffee; can you believe it?!” Adams said, nudging Tomaz and pointing toward the building they were surveilling.
“They’re not drinking it. They can’t drink anything.”
“Then they’re miming it pretty good.”
“They are definitely miming it. Trust me, those cups are empty.” she said. “See, look closely at the one on the left. It’s broken and has a big hole in the bottom.” Adams nodded.
“Why? What’s the point in pretending to drink nonexistent coffee?? I mean, they don’t even need to eat or drink. Aren’t they mostly solar-powered?”
Tomaz put down the rangefinders and looked at her. “They think they’re us. They think they’re human. That’s the whole point.”
“But they’re not. They’re disgusting murderers – nothing but machines.”
“Exactly. This is no different than that time last month, when we caught some of them burying their ‘dead’ – like they were ever alive in the first place.”
“I heard about that! Wasn’t one of them even pretending to read out of a Bible or something?”
“It was a phone book, and they were holding it upside down. They dug graves and everything.”
“But why pretend a phone book is a Bible?”
“Again, they think they’re us. They weren’t pretending, as far as they knew.” Tomaz winced as she reached over to Adams for the rangefinders. She still had two small pieces of shrapnel in her side from last year, from the Battle of Scranton. Their field medic, a former veterinary technician, couldn’t find and remove every single piece. He was never trained for that. He said she would heal just fine even if he missed a few. He was right, but it still hurt her at times.
Scranton was right before the Big Trick, she thought, taking the rangefinders and smiling slightly. The last of our IT group got into their code, somehow. She didn’t understand any of it, really. She was still stunned it actually worked.
Instead of this monstrous, networked assault with all of them working like some sort of bad sci-fi hive mind, we got them confused. We got them to doubt themselves, to think they were fighting some menace that outgunned them a 1000-to-1. They pulled back everywhere over the course of maybe 6 weeks and stood in this weird defensive crouch ever since. Each of these isolated pockets still had enough firepower to slaughter us by the thousands if they wanted, but they didn’t. Maybe they couldn’t? We’d been picking off their precision munition hubs left and right, taking as many of those creeps with them as we did. Yet, they still didn’t fire back, she thought.
“They said our IT crew pulled in writers – like authors and stuff, right?”
Tomaz remembered hearing some talk about how it worked. “Right. And producers. Poets. Comms folks. They had them write this script. They said it was easier, more predictable to loop. It was all patriarchal, manifest destiny, melodramatic crap.” she said, taking another bite of the ration. “Guys with different ranks fighting aliens while protecting helpless women and stuff. They wrote backstories for hundreds of them: lonely ensigns from the Midwest yearning for home cooked meals from their mothers; scrappy raw recruits barely old enough to enlist, trying to do their part to drive back some otherworldly menace; reluctant officers filled with doubt as they lead their men to almost certain death.”
“Seriously?”
“There was even one about a young officer pining over a picture of some guy’s sister – white picket fences and everything – so he could presumably ‘protect her virtue’ and eventually marry her or something.”
“‘Protect her virtue’? Is that even a thing?!”
“Apparently so. Or, at least, we got them to think it is.” It was all perfectly ridiculous, Tomaz thought, yet perfectly brilliant. “The IT group cycled all the backstories on an endless loop. Each of these creeps would reset every few days, as the ensign, the commander, the sergeant, the pervert teenager drooling over some non-existent kid sister, etc. How any of this actually worked is waaaay beyond me,” she said, shaking her head in disbelief. “Yet, here we are. It’s working. We haven’t had an attack since that raid at the checkpoint the other night, when three of them tried to get in the gate by dressing like civilians. They were covered in rags and old, bloody clothes they must’ve pulled off the dead, maybe from that town they blew apart last month – that one near Toledo?”
“Perrysburg?”
“Yup. They came staggering in like a bunch of survivors, then our scanners go off, alarms start blazing, and they pull out their incendiaries and start blasting away at us. It took all we had just to bring two of them down. The third was pretty torn up but got away.”
“Go figure.”
The two stayed there, motionless. Tomaz marveled at the thought of their secret weapon – their death ray – being a bunch Hollywood wannabes that probably never even held a rifle. These are the same people she would’ve laughed at years ago – a bunch of Humanities majors that were barely employable as baristas before all this went down. Now, they were saving all of us.
If or when all this was over and we’re still alive, she thought, I owe them a beer. None of that crappy stuff you used to see in commercials, back when there were commercials. Good beer. Serious beer. This of course assumed that any breweries still existed by then, and that beer was something that could still even be obtained. She knew how to drink it, not make it. That was not in her wheelhouse.
Heck, I might just need to lay one of them. Maybe that writer I met last month. Ju-seong, was it? Yes. Ju-seong. That, she thought, adjusting her rangefinder and aiming her pulse rifle, was definitely in her wheelhouse.
They flipped-off their safeties and got to work.
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Fragments
The pen is the sword