Catching Up - Chimerica - The Mekhikan-Chimerican War - Herbivorism - The Californian’s Rifle
John Brown was a radical abolitionist in the days leading up to the Civil War in America, and is a culturally-significant figure among leftists and progressives. The crowning achievement of his was the raid on Harper’s Ferry, a town with a massive arsenal. He hoped that he would be able to seize the town, incite many local slaves to join his cause, hand them weapons from the armories, and then do the same thing to another town, and another, and another, until all the slaves in the country were free. This went pear-shaped almost immediately. As it turns out, slaves aren’t good at taking initiative. He was bottled up in the armory waiting for reinforcements that would never come and soon his entire warband was either killed or captured (and then killed).
To his enemies, he is a religious terrorist who tried to start a race war on behalf of the industrialist bourgeoisie, failed, lied about his intentions to make them sound more noble and marketable, had the lies propagated by a supportive Northern press, and then died anyways. His supporters see him basically the same way but find it inspiring to know that, no matter how malicious they are or how badly they fuck up, the media will make them sound like crusaders of virtue.
I am an actual revolutionary. I don’t have the bourgeois press’s admiration, nor do I want it. I also don’t have delusions of grandeur. What I do have is a task, given to me by a higher power, to make this “Confederacy” business work. And that means being smart. And maybe acknowledging that possibly arguably not all religions are superstitious bullshit potentially in this specific case, conceivably.
So I made a sympathetic audience. I manipulated the nearest reporters into assembling where I could speak to them and, to the sound of arsenals exploding in the town below, gave a prepared speech on the founding principles of Chimerican democracy, and then I fled into the hills. A figure wearing a strange mask, talking about rebellion as “his followers” plunder and burn a town right under the nose of the Chimerican army? What journalist could pass that up? My hope was to let the people know that, if they didn’t want to fight for the Union, they didn’t have to. When Rob Lee goes on his next rampage, what will you be able to do to help him?
Akotok informed me that it worked. Confederate sympathizers had started actively infiltrating the Union. One receipt at a time, they siphoned off money and arms, working their way up the ranks specifically to gum up the system when the word went out. This had been so successful that Akotok had been told to report to the Union government on the state of industrialization in rural Chimerica, including Harper’s Ferry, even though last time he was there he was borrowing my rifle and blew away a bunch of Chimerican naval infantry as they tried to seize the last surviving bridge into town.
“So you woke up covered in moss and lichen and didn’t think for a second that you’d gotten Rip-Van-Winkle’d?” Mycuze pressed me as we rode the train to our next point of interest. The wind rushing outside was the closest thing either of us had had to air conditioning since we got here.
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Rip Van Winkle is an American folk story, a guy goes to sleep in the mountains and wakes up years later to a changed world. Dates back centuries. Super famous image. You ARE American right?” He pressed.
“The proletariat has no nation.” I retorted.
He leaned back in his chair, staring at me under his mask. Then he groaned with annoyance and stopped talking. He had an attache case of sorts and he returned his attention to the notes he’d been taking. I gleaned what I could but I was looking at it upside-down and there was a lot of technical language I didn’t know. Mycuze was clearly an engineer of some sort. It looked like he was taking the trip as an excuse to see where Chimerican industry was technologically, and what he could do with it. I saw a drawing that was essentially a steam engine locomotive but with wide wheels, armor plates, and machine gun ports - an ultra-primitive tank. Most of the other sketches he had I didn’t recognize at all.
Akotok sat beside him at our booth. It didn’t pass beneath my notice that, while Mycuze moved to the side to give the erstwhile cultist more elbow room, he also folded into himself like he thought the man-sized deer would bite. “Hey, Rob, remember all that stuff you done told us about Karl Marx?”
“Like it was yesterday,” I joked.
He laughed mildly. “Well, for you it was. Anyways, I had one of our European connections ask around, and I think he found him. Or our equivalent.” He set a small stack of books on the table. “Picked up some translations, made a few ourselves. I, er, will warn you… this guy is very different to the one you described.”
“Ruh-roh.” I muttered.
“Yeah.” Akotok said awkwardly. “I think you ought to go over these yourself.”
I slid the stack of books over to myself. Chimerican politics, as it had been described to me, and as I had seen firsthand, was based entirely around race. It was gauche to be flatly tribalistic but the main question hanging over all of Europe was a racial question, the racial question. “How do we get all these disparate races to live together in harmony?” It was such a big deal because races here were so much more diverse compared to Earth. Where genetics end and stereotypes begin is a matter of debate but everyone assumes that a cat will chow down on a mouse the instant they think they can get away with it, and that level of distrust exists, in a lesser form, across all sorts of species boundaries. Sheep and cows have gotten into shooting wars over farmland before (supposedly sheep are poor land stewards), cats and dogs just cannot get along, everyone hates the pigs, and these tensions define societies. In Chimerica, the idea WAS that they would encourage interspecies breeding and eventually make racial categories meaningless, but now the country’s split on the topic. Today that’s what the Confederates in the South believe, while the Union in the North believes that actually segregation is the way forwards. A place for every race in every city. Instead of racial classes being ad-hoc and unofficial, they’ll be mandatory and all-encompassing. It’s easier for the state to work with “the rat district’s mayor” than “the guy who most rats supposedly take cues from”. Both systems were commonly understood to be better than “let everyone fight as much as they want so they don’t pay attention to what the king is doing”, the traditional European method.
My hope was that, since this world’s history was kind of like a parody of our own, a furred Karl Marx would arrive and show everyone another way. Get everyone thinking about class instead of race. Well, the first book on the stack, and the shortest, was The Herbivore’s Manifesto, so it wasn’t looking good.
Speaking of history…
“Hey, Akotok. I checked the newspapers in the station. I notice that there isn’t a war going on.” I spoke up.
“Oh, that?” He jumped. As I had flipped through my stack of tomes he had gotten out one of his dusty old arcane texts. “I thought that’s what we were supposed to do.”
“No, where we come from the political divide spilled over about a year ago,” Mycuze butted in.
“Oh, did it? A lot of Southerners were fuming about the elections and wanted to leave, but we made them calm down. Mostly. Some are trying to break away on their own, there’s been a few conspiracies against the government, a few riots. Should we not have done that?” He looked between the two of us.
“No, the Confederacy in our world lost.” I pointed out. “They had a good portion of the nation’s resources, but they didn’t have the supply lines to sustain a war.”
“Steel. Foundries. Railway tracks. Bodies. It’s fine to have a better army, but a battle is a defeat by default if the other guy can replace his losses and you can’t replace yours.” MYcuze added.
“Riots and conspiracies, huh? They moved in soldiers yet?” Atotok nodded ‘yes’ and I whistled. “Yeah, this is perfect. When we get back, we’ll have to get the government to take whoever they have putting down the riots and replace them with the worst-behaved most Yankee-ass battalions they can find. That’ll get you some recruits.”
Akotok sighed. “We’ll see. We don’t have a lot of our fellows in the officer corps yet.”
I shrug. “This stuff takes time. As long as Yankees are leaving the government and being replaced by us, we’re winning. If we’re lucky we might be able to simply lock out our enemies one day. But siphoning off more government resources to our own causes will do for now.”
“Makes me wonder what I’m here to do.” Mycuze wondered aloud.
I nodded to his papers. “You’re an engineer, right? Figure out what technologies are the future and get us on the ground floor.”
“We missed the boat on railways. Probably too early for oil. Or are we… what would it take to build an internal combustion engine, I wonder…” He thought aloud before diving back into his notes.
“Now, next question.” I looked at Akotok. “Where’d everyone get to after Harper’s Ferry?”
There wasn’t one answer. I’d seen Lennox and Sletky around, even said hi to the latter since fuck Lennox, but the Harper’s Ferry crew had been about 25 of the cult’s most trusted. Turns out a lot of them got government jobs like Akotok and were bribing or co-hiring their way up through the ranks. Others were community leaders now, keeping alive the embers of the 1860 election outrage and keeping out any nosy Yankees who might actually fix something. And Tecren got shot in a back alley over unpaid gambling debts. I was amazed to discover that, in the last three years, only a single one of the old crew had died a violent death. I expected at least five. Clocke died of typhoid six months back, which was a shame, he was always fun to be around.
Of course, the number could have been higher. One of the things the cult had done after I disappeared was seriously invest in information security, so after 1860 Akotok only had vague ideas where most of them got off to. That was fine by me. That sort of thing worked both ways and, let’s face it, this conspiracy was BIG. The stunt at Harper’s Ferry let the Union know something was happening, and they’d be leaning on any sympathetic characters they could find, but with any luck they wouldn’t realize the extent of our infiltration until it was too late.
Over the course of the train ride, I caught up with the pieces of the old crew and met the new. One night we shared drinks, swapped stories, traded worldviews. Most of them were the outer cult members, clearly not let in on the truth of my existence or their cause but still committed enough to some part of it to fight for it. Most of them didn’t like how the Union government was trying to get involved in their relationships, taking away their wives or their friend’s wives. Or they were just bored. It struck me that the interspecies romances were often between larger or more predatory males and smaller females. I decided not to ask about it, it wasn’t really my fight. My existence as a human was something of a secret, as was the fact that they were travelling with some of the raiders of Harper’s Ferry and Rob Lee himself, so I didn’t have much to add.
I can’t recall anyone there beyond what species of animal they were and what stories they told, but there were some good ones. Before TV telling stories was the main way people entertained each other, and by the standards of today every random hick was a maestro. My favorite was a raccoon who described an experience he’d had in this world’s version of the Mexican-American War.
He had been a common foot soldier at the time, part of the army that was moving against Tenochtitlan, the capital of Mekhico. It was him, his best friend Pat Flannigan, Captain Kent, and the rest of the troops, including a mute giant (elephant-men in this world were 9 or 10 feet, but this one was described as being at least twice that) which the regiment had adopted as their mascot. The first task in taking the city was the capture of the nearby fort of Chapultepec, built upon a great hill. The Americans shelled the city for three days and three nights. On the morning of the fourth day, Captain Kent lined the unit up before the walls, ready to assault any breaches, but no breach came. In fact, the cannonballs were simply bouncing off the stone! Morning turned into afternoon, and afternoon turned into evening, and the troops stood there, waiting for something to happen. Just as the horizon began to turn red, the giant spoke for the first time anyone had heard. “To hell with this!” He shouted and threw down his gun. Then he walked towards the fortress. The world rumbled with every footstep of the creature, and just as the American cannonballs bounced off the castle walls, the Mekhican bullets bounced off the grey hide of the great elephant. He put one arm to his shoulder and swung his other arm in a big circle once, twice, and during the third time - Bam! With the sound of a hundred thunderclaps, he punched a hole in the wall large enough for a train to drive through!
The soldiers flooded into the castle and a furious melee ensued. Bayonet clashed with bayonet, sword clanged against sword. The Mekhicans fought like devils, but room by room, wall by wall, they were driven back. Just as the moon rose over the hills of Mekhiko, the Chimerican flag rose over the fort.
The regiment was ordered to guard their captured territory and let the others handle Tenochtitlan. The troops obliged, all being exhausted after the battle. The morning after, the siege of the city proper began. Cannons were wheeled up to the hill of the captured fort and firing pits were dug in front of the walls facing the city. It became one of the places from which the artillery shelled the walled city itself. Once they were set up, the giant came to them. “You would have a better angle if you fired from up there,” he said to the artillery crews, pointing up to the castle ramparts. The artillery crews laughed, since while the giant was right, they couldn’t in a hundred years get their cannons to the top of the ancient walls. But the giant could, and he picked up each cannon in one hand and flung them like discs onto the ramparts, then it was him laughing as the artillerymen stared dumbstruck.
This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.
Soon they were able to bombard not just the buildings in the city, but the royal palace! “Surely,” we all thought, “this would make the siege end sooner if the king of Mekhico was personally under threat”! But it was not to be! As the regular army stormed the walls, a stray cannonball broke through the royal palace, through the basement, and into an ancient native ruin, disturbing the tomb of the dread emperor Montezuma! The ghost soon rose from his long-buried temple, bringing with him the great host of his army, and began raising the dead soldiers to battle the Chimerican invaders. This new entrant raised the spirits of the Mekhican army, who soon followed the legions of the dead in chasing away the Chimericans from the walls and across the fields around the city.
“I was told to hold this fort and by God I’ll hold it!” Captain Kent declared. The dead swarmed around the structure and the soldiers fired bullets as fast as they could load them - it was impossible to miss. The great breach hadn’t been repaired and was soon clogged with corpses, only to be dug out again by Mekhican sappers with pickaxes and clogged again. The zombies and ghouls and Mekhican soldiers were endless, a sea of bodies. The troops began to lose heart as we ran low on powder. Captain Kent stood on top of a cart and waved his sword in the air, calling on us to “stand and fight, boys! Stand and fight!” But by that time Montezuma himself had reached the castle, and he called down a star from the heavens that crushed Captain Kent to death. That’s when the dam burst and everyone attempted to flee.
But standing in front of the gate was the giant, who, smirking, looked at those who were still standing and said, “I’m disappointed. Turned out by these bags of bones? I guess I’ll just have to win this battle myself!” Then he charged back out through the breach he had created. With every swing of his great arms, a dozen zombies were thrown this way, a dozen Mekhicans thrown that way. We ran after him, only to find ourselves swarmed on all sides by the enemy, living and dead! When he saw the giant barrelling towards him, Montezuma tried to escape, but his undead were packed too closely together, and he couldn’t move. He was forced to call a general retreat, and his army turned and fled back into the city.
But the giant did not stop! Now that they were no longer pressing into him, he stopped swatting them across the field, he simply trampled over every foe that didn’t get out of the way fast enough. Montezuma called down stars from heaven to strike the giant, but they simply left scorch marks on his face. He laughed at that! “It’s been a while since something managed to hurt me!” And then he ran twice as fast, crushing twice as many enemies underfoot. At the city gates, the army turned and tried to stop him, but the giant merely rubbed his hands together before unleashing a great clap that sent a bolt of lightning through the crowd and bowling them all over, at which point he kept walking.
Finally, at the front door of the royal palace, he caught up to the desiccated god-emperor. “My empire! My empire! I will give you anything if you let me take back my empire! Tell me what you want and you shall have it!” He cried to the giant.
“I want you out of my sight, you beast!” The giant replied before grabbing the corpse by the ankle and throwing him into the sky, all the way to the city of Reme, in Latium, where he landed and would one day run for political office on an anti-Spaniard platform.
The soldier telling this story and his friend Pat Flannigan raised the Chimerican flag over the palace, causing the scattered units in the hills to reform and officially occupy the city. In the mad dash, the regiment had taken such casualties that the giant, the soldier, and Pat Flannigan were the only survivors left. “What now?” The soldier asked them.
“Well I had a good time. I think I’ll stay in the army.” Pat Flannigan said.
“I think I shall, too.” The soldier replied. “And you?”
“This army’s too small for me.” The giant sadly explained. “I shall leave and find a foe worth fighting. Some other old despot, some other tyrant to battle.”
As the giant walked out the door, Pat Flannigan called to him. “What’s your name, giant?”
The giant looked back. The stars that fell on his face had left star-shaped scars. “Call me Rob Lee,” he said, before walking into the sunset, never to be seen again.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that the story was outright bullshit. They all gave me a good ribbing over it. It’s a rite of passage among Southerners to subject city slickers to a tall tale like this and see how long it takes them to break. But once I understood it was deliberately ridiculous, it became one of the most engrossing things I’d ever heard. I wound up contributing to my own legend by saying that I had met Rob Lee once, and describing him with some reheated Chuck Norris jokes. It’s rare you get to write your own biography but they didn’t realize they were talking to the actual Rob Lee and I couldn’t pass up the opportunity.
I came out of the sleeper car slightly drunk and feeling like there was a possibility that this society could get over its racist attitudes. After all, the Confederacy was extremely diverse, and they were turning the Union government into swiss cheese.
A few days later, we were out of the temperate mountains, over the endless forests, and into the endless swamps, and then our train pulled into New Orleans. The Chimericans called it something else but I’ve forgotten the name. Akotok and his assistants were out and about tallying up the state’s manufactories while I read the local papers to try and get a handle on the political climate. A lot had indeed changed in three years. People didn’t get accused of trying to peacefully secede anymore, they got accused of high treason and warmongering. Some people were saying that the police were doing off-the-books investigations to persecute political criminals without the approximately Union-aligned city government knowing, and considering that the city government was Union-aligned because of a bunch of legally-dubious impeachments and appointments, well, I could believe it.
I was done reading the books I had been given. They were too depressing. “Kagan Marshak”, an ewe living in urban Dutchland, had written such works as The Herbivore’s Manifesto and The Dutch Ideology to advocate a radical departure from the existing race politics of the world. He had his own version of Marxist historiography where the dialectic between oppressed and oppressor was replaced with one between prey and predator, which might sound sensible to a human but it had some baffling implications. For one, it basically meant that any predator was a de-facto bourgeoisie and if you got rid of the existing power structures without also getting rid of ALL predators then the surviving predator groups would work to reestablish a predator-over-prey system. In this framework, a revolutionary terror is, in fact, a racial genocide that bypasses any prey species complicit in the oppressive system in order to exterminate predators that might have nothing to do with it. This was a radical departure from the race politics of the world because most political ideologies still saw races as distinct interest groups where alliances could bridge the predator-prey divide while at the same time conflicts could fail to do so. Marshakist Communists thought that, if predators fight other predators, it’s a ploy, and if predators get along with prey, that’s also a ploy, and if prey fight prey, predators are somehow responsible.
Is this how historical materialism sounds to normal people? Like an antisemitic conspiracy theory with a few words switched around?
I myself was still reeling from the fact that apparently not all religions are superstitions created to keep the masses in a fearful stupor. I never met the god of Akotok or any of the other gods his companions follow but one of their avenues for hiring people was apparently to grab them from another universe so they have to be onto SOMETHING, right? Like, my existence here didn’t make sense unless material reality is, in fact, malleable. There were other things that made no sense, like the business with the fish. Back on Earth I hadn’t been a guy who fucks fish, but I’m pretty sure that if you do that the fish don’t come to you and beg for it. In Chimerica they did. I was told that, by inseminating them, I would create a new race of fish-human hybrids through the magical intervention of the gods. I didn’t stick around long enough to find out the full extent of that.
In Chimerica everything I knew was wrong. That was a new experience. It was not a pleasant one.
At the very least, whatever Kagan Marshak’s version of Das Kapital was, it wouldn’t be out for another few years. I’m the only person in two worlds who’s read all three volumes cover to cover and my reward was being able to prove that other people hadn’t read it, but only to myself, since as the only person in the world who read it, everyone else had to take me at my word that what I was saying was true. They didn’t.
Communism has a reputation for being a bit hostile to outsiders. There’s a lot of reading required to understand the jargon and concepts. Somehow these morons can handle hundreds of pages of political theory and come away unable to parse a single sentence when it’s on my Bluesky page. One time I suggested that the Revolutionary Council would be able to solve black unemployment in a penstroke and put them to work in the factories, and to this day people accuse me of racism over it. I used to ask what their preferred solution was but I was never able to get a straight answer besides “there won’t be jobs after the revolution,” I guess because a shocking amount of self-described “communists” can’t tell the difference between Karl Marx and Santa Claus. The exception was the amateur comedian who suggested that the NBA be expanded to 300,000 teams and somehow wasn’t accused of racism until six months later, when it turned out, to the inexplicable shock of everyone, that “ArtyomKazantsev2006” was some chud’s alt account.
Sitting there in the street, nursing a coffee and watching the many dozens of kinds of human-animal mix walk by, I had to laugh. If I made it home from this interdimensional adventure I would be one of the few people in the world who had actually been a part of a revolution, and I’d managed to do it in a way that nobody would ever believe. My Marxist credentials were rapidly speeding past anyone’s ability to give a shit.
Mycuze came from the crowd and walked straight towards me. In the quagmire of racial consciousness my brain was in, I saw him wrong at first and nearly jumped out of my skin at the sight of a figure wearing long, light-colored clothing with a pointy cloth hood. Then I remembered that the KKK didn’t exist yet, and possibly never would, and it was just the other human. Finally, a distraction. “Hey, got something I’ve been meaning to ask you.” He started.
“Fire away.” I replied.
He sat next to me and kicked back. Of course, he wasn’t relaxed, he was around the human-animals and he was always immensely tightly-wound up when around them, but he was making an effort to seem unperturbed for my sake. “When you came from earth, Akotok says you brought with you your own rifle. What the hell was it?”
“Just an AR.” I waved him away.
“That’s what he said, but I pressed him, and he described it a bit more, and it doesn’t sound like no AR I’ve ever seen.” He pressed. Guy must have been a gun nut. I took the hint and decided that, if he was going to try to get to know me, I wouldn’t stop him. We were supposed to be working together.
A couple minutes later, I’d grabbed the suitcase I was keeping my rifle in and we’d found a cramped bathroom in the back of a bookstore to talk about it in. “Normally, I’d ask you to promise not to laugh, but I don’t think you can honestly do that.” I began. I unbuttoned the luggage, then unzipped the nylon rifle bag inside. “This is deeply embarrassing.”
“It better not be some tacticool bullshit.” He chuckled as he stood above me.
I pulled out my fighting rifle, my implement of revolution. I could only imagine that Mycuze’s jaw dropped. A long barrel with no foregrip or anywhere else to put my hands. A thumbhole stock with a fin instead of a thumbhole. A ten-round magazine. The only cool thing about it was that it had a bipod and a Chinese ACOG clone. “You got to be shitting me.” Mycuze laughed. “Rob, why do you own this? Ain’t you from Georgia?”
“So, not really. I was in Georgia for a range trip with some other comrades. I’m from Cali. And yes, I know it’s bullshit, but I was broke as fuck and always put off getting it ‘corrected’.” I could have carved out the thumbhole myself, and foregrips aren’t illegal in Cali, but getting real 30-round magazines would have taken most of a day and involved driving to a friend in Nevada and back. I won’t blame myself for being lazy about that last part. Really wishing I hadn't, though. Out here in Chimerica, most people used single-shot rifles or revolvers. If they were fancy, they used lever-actions. Revolver rifles were another thing, a lot more popular here than in our own timeline. Having only ten rounds meant that my magazine size wasn’t much better than that of a serious gunfighter and the lack of a foregrip meant that in a lot of situations I couldn’t feasibly shoot much faster either. What I had was range. My sighs had been set for 300 meters, and had 4x magnification, and having a bipod meant that I could find a stable shooting platform anywhere. My enemies had nothing but ironsights and hope. They could hit me at 300 meters, but a lot more stars had to align for them to even have a chance, and if they missed a lot of them would lose their sight picture just by loading a new round, and meanwhile all I had to do was put the dot over their head and not jerk the trigger too hard.
As we ran from the burning remains of Harper’s Ferry, I’d been able to take out three soldiers and pin down the rest of the platoon without them ever getting close to hitting me. Rumor had it that they thought they were going up against a few sharpshooters at the same time. They later chalked it up to one of the raiders being a legendary marksman.
“Well, god damn. Sucks to be you.” Mycuze commented as he held my rifle, feeling out the balance, checking the sights, and keeping his finger off the trigger. It creaked slightly under his touch and I wondered if he was used to weapons made of polymer. He tapped the wall where the thumbhole was supposed to be. “I can definitely get this drilled out for you. Even if it means heating up the plastic first to make it soft, 1860’s tools are dogshit. Ain’t sure I can do much else that won’t be jerry-rigged to hell and back. But getting that thumbhole un-fucked will make it a lot easier to use.”
“I would certainly appreciate that!” I smiled as if he could see my face. “Hey, did you have anything good on you when you got grabbed?”
“No, I was travelling pretty light at the time, except for this here box of doom.” Part of Mycuze’s luggage was a wooden crate that only he knew the contents of. I’d asked around but nobody knew what was inside, except that the crate was also a disguise and the real contents were kept in a much more modern container. I knew it was a weapon of some sort since Mycuze had brought it with us when I offered to show him my own firearm. But I had no idea what. Even looking at it I couldn’t guess. To need as much space as it was given, the thing must have been huge.
When he opened the wooden shell and pulled out the matte black plastic case, I knew I was in for something good. It looked like it was a suitcase nuke. What he pulled out was almost as insane.
It was a quadrotor, obviously homemade in whole or in part. Large so that it could carry a cargo of a few pounds. That cargo was another AR, or at least part of one. A servo had been wired directly to the internals so a lot of the weapon’s pieces were missing to save weight and space. Exposed cables had been zip-tied wherever they wouldn’t get caught in a moving part. Sitting besides the drone was the controller and a stack of portable solar panels. “Rob, I ain’t going to lie, I have no idea how you handle it. Those fucking manimals give me the creeps like nothing I’ve ever seen before. I kept this secret from them in case they ever turned on me. But it’s a hell of a thing. I checked and it all still works here. Even the video feed. Even the dead reckoning system.”
“The dead reckoning system?” I asked absent-mindedly. I’d meant to ask “why do you own this?” but for the first time in months Mycuze felt like he could speak his mind and he was running at full speed.
“Yeah. It has onboard memory, tracks its path after launch with an onboard compass. Programmed it myself. You set it to ‘operations mode’ and if it loses contact with the controller for too long it will go to a pre-set altitude and make its way back. Isn’t real anti-EW tech but it’d keep me from losing it if I ran into a blackout zone. Hell of a thing, hell of a thing.”
I held out my hands. “Hold on!” I shouted. I could just barely make out his eyes and saw him remember that, as far as he was concerned, a communist revolutionary was just as dangerous as the deer-beasts, it was just easier to forget it with a fellow human. I had a sneaking suspicion of why he was scared of me, too. See, a drone like this would have been super high-tech in 2022, the year I got yoinked, especially for a random American. Basically the only reason to have one would be to commit an assassination or some other terrorist attack. But he mentioned electronic warfare in that ramble and that implies that, whoever he wanted to kill, they knew he was coming. “Mycuze, what year was it on earth when you left?”
He hesitantly looked at me, weighing up whether or not he could find a way for me to use this info against him. “2029, why?”
