The Varkaat

I should have been afraid.

Alright, I was afraid. But my fear was nothing compared to my shame. Watching her do her duty as a soldier, when I knew mine, made me feel like a fraud. She wasn't just efficient and organized and lethal. She killed our disgusting enemies with style. I was quite sure that she was showing off, just to, "help me to overcome my natural tendency to make anthropocentric judgments."

I signed up for this. I'm not too bright.

She got us out of danger. They came over that hill in relentless, crashing, idiotic waves. Their eyes are as blank and lifeless as screens when the power is off. Their every shuddering, freakishly awkward move is focused on one objective: your destruction. Hands, feet, teeth, claws--some of them are members of species with prehensile tails; some spew venom from various orifices; at least one was little more than a ball of sentient gas. I watched it smother three members of our platoon before she caught it in a discarded helmet, along with a fission grenade, and threw it into an abandoned trench. How they rigged it with that obedience ring, I can only guess. I mean, it didn't have a bloody head, right?

Some of the lads actually cheered and hoisted her up. I felt like a big girl's blouse. The lads are all dead now.

She blazed her way through another swarm of them, and we're taking a breather in one of the few pods that's still intact. I'm basically cargo at this point. I lost it and threw my weapon at one of them before we high tailed it.

Unarmed, I watched her dispatch about a dozen of them, single handed. She can shoot the center of an obedience ring with shocking accuracy at twenty paces, and once it's gone, so are they. In fact, that's the only way to keep them down. Any other damage, even if it sheers off a limb, doesn't matter. They just keep coming at you until you're ready to become one of them, which means you're dead.

"Forgive me, my English is from the obedience ring. It was not learned, but downloaded, you know? I stumble because recollection is not understanding. You have not been fighting for long, I think. What were you before?"

"A prompt engineer," I am embarrassed to reply. It is kind of amazing that we can both breathe this planet's air. Most of the species that have joined our side are remarkably humanoid. There are some religious zealots who get very excited about this, but I think it may just be the way biology sorts out its relationship with a mind. Anyway, she's sort of cute, if you want the truth. Weird, exotic, sure. But I have been alone for a long time.

"What about you?" It seems insane, shooting the breeze like this when we are probably going to be killed in a little while. You learn to do it, though. It's a way of pretending that things will get back to normal soon, and you're not really going to be torn apart by soulless monsters and then altered so that you can join their ranks. It's also something they can't do, which makes it feel wonderful.

"I was a teacher. I think that's why I learned to kill these unthinking things so quickly and so well." Instead of laughing, she sings. I guess I should have put it this way: her laughter sounds like a song. Have you ever heard the call of a Canadian loon? I'm not referring to currency or the mentally ill. Her laugh sounds a bit like that bird's call, but it isn't grim or mournful--think of the high note with no crashing back to earth.

She is methodically checking and adjusting her weapon, her armor, the pod--the comms beacon is operational, so she activates it; it won't make any difference--my armor. It's all done with a kind of ritualistic grace, like a tea ceremony or a jazz solo. I can barely move. The adrenaline crash hollows you out and sits on your chest.

"Was it really that bad?"

"Wasn't your education stupid, after the obedience rings became, this may not be the right way to say it, saturated--no--universal? None of my students read anything and most had no idea how to think. Everything was provided by the obedience ring. Teaching became like your Beckett's stories, yes? Theater of absurdity or...theater of the absurd, yes. Yes, that's right." She sings again. Our funeral dirge.

She has a point. That's one of the reasons why the Varkaat are so popular, until it's too late. First they introduce the obedience ring as a luxury item for the elite, then they come up with a commercial version, and before you know it, everyone's got one. The hordes we're fighting wear big, ostentatious numbers on their heads--or their equivalent anatomy, like the choking hazard mentioned above--but the obedience rings that the Varkaat distribute to the population in the first wave are stylish and discrete, like a wristwatch or a choker. They get you hooked with access to everything: information, entertainment, commerce, pornography; whatever your eyes crave. It's all piped into your nervous system directly. No one ever pauses for more than a few seconds. No one is ever at a loss for words. Boredom goes extinct. So does learning. I never got a ring. I wonder what it cost her to get rid of hers.

"I remember the morons suddenly knowing all of the answers in class. My mother couldn't afford an obedience ring for me during the first wave. Once she had one, I kind of lost interest, because she lost interest in me. That's why I got my job, which was pretty horrible. No one with an obedience ring is any good at prompt engineering. LLMs need organic minds to surprise or challenge them. They don't eat their own slop."

I managed to get up a little while ago, and I've been watching the jungle through the dirty window on the east wall of the pod. She's practicing. She has a very personal relationship with her gun.

"Yes, it is the same where I was born. When I refused the obedience ring, I lost my work, that is, my job. Then I lost my home. I joined the memory right after I surrendered my little, pretty hiding place. I decided to study resistance, so that I can teach others to resist. I did not know I was good at killing monsters. They make you find out."

She's a savant. It's alright to envy a savant, isn't it?

"You were foolish to throw your gun. Let me see if there is one here. You will need a gun if you do not wish to die."

Not every sound she makes is musical.

Just in case you're wondering, they're just called "rings" when they get their hooks into you at first. Lots of cultures attach special importance to that symbol, as it turns out. The Varkaat know what they're doing.

"How long have you been fighting?"

"Since I joined, which was just before they took your home--eight long years? No, for eight years is better, I think. They are short, and difficult, these years. You will see. You will learn to kill them and keep them from killing you. Come, I will be your teacher." She found a rifle somewhere. They put emergency supplies, some gear and some weapons, into each pod. A ship enters orbit, gets a lock on the obedience ring distributors, then drops a few memories onto the surface and hopes. That's what we call the enthusiastic amateurs who have banded together to resist the Varkaat: memories. No one can remember anything important once the obedience ring takes over. It's a cheeky joke at the expense of the Varkaat, our name.

"Take the gun. No, do not hold it that way!" She slaps my wrist and shifts my grip on the rifle, then steps back to clock my position and technique. She shakes her head and says something under her breath that I can't grok. "You look at me with hunger. Nothing will happen with us," she says, then puts her foot on my knee and pushes. I fold like a deck chair. She sings.

"I'm sorry," I say, trying to get back to my feet with some dignity. "I've been alone since I joined. I can't wash the aroma of solitude off." The rifle is loaded. I'm not much of a marksman, but I'm just covering her while she does the real killing.

"I tried one of you about a year ago," she says, slapping the top of my head and raising the rifle so that I am looking along its edge at her. "So vulgar. You can't tell painting a house from painting a...picture of someone--a portrait! Yes, that's right. All utility and no art. Funny faces when you get excited. You're soft and slow and timid, too. Boring. Nothing will happen with us. Are you angry?" She lifts my elbow, looks me over again, nudges my leg back a bit.

"No," I lie, a bit sheepishly. She moves so perfectly. I'm sure that's true whatever she is doing. I'll never know. I clock one of them at the window. She reads my look, turns to look at the thing in the window, twirls her gun.

"What do they want, in the end, the Varkaat?" I have been wondering about this myself since before I joined. They don't have a home. Parasites turn your home into their nest. I remember my mother, before she got the ring, sighing and complaining about the steady disappearance of what she called "bricks and mortar" shops in our drab neighborhood. When everything is done with the obedience ring, there's no need for charming salesmen to separate the gullible from their cash. Grim warehouses full of crap spring up here and there, completely automated, and the obedience ring lets you scroll and choose and summon goods and services.

The Varkaat work the same way: no headquarters, no towering, ominous fortress where they cook their diabolical schemes; just the ships, browsing solar systems for signs of intelligent life that can be made theirs. They've got most of the advanced, industrialized species already. We're on a lush little planet where some clever primates are showing promising signs: fire, tools, resolving disputes with orgies instead of bloodshed. The Varkaat want to get them in the cradle. They will, but we can make it harder for them, for a while.

She kicks the door open, somersaults into the jungle, shoots the monster in the forehead. "They want everything," she says, moving slowly toward what she's killed to inspect what's left. She shoots the ring a second time. What is the word for spite, in her first language?

"Can we stop them, eventually?" I scan the perimeter, holding the rifle the way she taught me to, praying she won't be upset by my shaky clumsiness.

"Probably not. It is worth trying, though. It is good to have others to talk with, to remember." We'll have to move: everything this one saw will be seen by the Varkaat. She's inside, collecting anything portable and useful. I look the dead one over. I've seen his kind before. What gods did he worship? What foods did he enjoy, when he had a choice? Did the Varkaat infect his world's politics, like they did ours? Tech lords, scorning the fear and skepticism of the old, putting on dazzling displays of the smooth convenience and power of the ring. Our resistance became their success.

The logic of smug inevitability, once installed, is impervious to negotiation.

"Stop looking at that thing," she says, handing me a bag of supplies. "I was surprised when they did not stink, the first time. The obedience ring mists them with antiseptic at regular intervals, yes? Slows the rot."

It's one of the most popular policies of the Varkaat: casualties become part of the horde, which means no conscription, no ghastly video of life forms that look like you, with pets and siblings and secret dreams, being cut down in the field. Only the dead fight for them. They send hordes from foreign worlds to fight the locals. You never see a fallen relative fighting some lunatic group of stubborn memories on your feed.

We start moving east through the jungle. "If I am killed, use this." She hands me a pyro grenade. She must have found it in the pod. I will do as she asks. I do not want to fight her if she dies.

"Were you happy, when you had the obedience ring?" One of the local primates makes a desperate sound in the leaves ahead. That will attract the horde. She is already cutting orthogonally through the wet foliage, creating a gap between us and the howler.

"I was taught to believe I was, but it was a lie. I enjoy remembering forgetting things, now. That is a kind of happiness."