Guns and Flowers
By Martin Schmidt
"If it hadn't been for the flower, I would have killed her."
The room in which these words were heard was as marked by Judgment Day as everything on earth, but at least its walls and roof were structurally sound. This, some bars in front of the windows and a newly installed reinforced door made this room a prison, the appropriate place to store a traitor. The resistance had had its fair share of traitors and criminals, and not all of them were shot on sight. The Big Man himself had ordered the traitor in this room to be spared, but the motive for his actions had to be known and a punishment had to be meted out. With the war in a precarious balance, there had to be harsh consequences for attacking a Terminator.
One of the resistance's own, that is.
The traitor was a haggard man, a drawn face on top of a bundle of sticks wrapped in sinewy muscle and skin. His eyes were haunted, even by the standard of someone having fought a postapocalyptical world war for the last ten years.
"Let's start over.", a second voice stated. "Please describe the situation leading to the incident."
"Fine. We're all boned, anyway. Why not waste the little time we have with some pleasant chit chat."
"The war is going as expected. We're a long way from being finished, Sergeant Kruger."
"Not that you're going to believe me, but as long as we use our own tin cans, it's not going to matter. And maybe it shouldn't. Evolution and all that." Kruger barked a harsh laugh.
"We will see about that, won't we? Now please, let's go over this once again. For the record. There will actually be one for this. Connor himself is interested in your case."
"Should I be flattered? My guess: It's only because I attacked his favourite tin can. Man's as great as they come, but concerning this, he's as blind as the rest of you.
"Anyway, here goes: My name is Lewis Kruger, I am a sergeant of the 57nd S.O.C.."
"Which makes Commander Phillips your commanding officer."
"I know she's my commanding officer, damn it! Wouldn't have made a lick of difference if she had been the Third Coming!"
"Please, continue"
"Our mission was to intercept a Skynet military convoy bound for Los Angeles out of the Seven Angels US Military Research facility in the Nevada desert. Our intel indicated that Skynet had recovered some biological weapon of mass destruction there, something we wouldn't want influencing the war in LA.
"We lay in ambush in the ruins of some backwater hick town. My platoon was assigned to provide heavy fire from cover, right across the street from me. My job was supervision and the assignment of reinforcements. Commander Phillips felt that the encounter could go bad rather easily and that we would need some guys in reserve to lend a hand at all the spots that would be hard pressed by the tin cans.
"Turns out she was right. Skynet maybe didn't expect us but it surely expected something. HK-Flybys hit us pretty hard and the Terminators dug in. Without the guys in reserve helping out where things got tough, they would have wiped the floor with us. Soon I was supervising only myself, watching the battle through my Hi-Res Combat Goggles and wondering in which fire fight I would be most useful.
"My eyes strayed more often than not to the position of my platoon. Your's would, too, if you had lived through Denver with a bunch of guys. They did real good, and they were fine right until the end.
"I can see the scene whenever I close my eyes. They just mowed down the left wing of the tin cans and ran out of things to shoot. Then a freaking barrel falls from the sky, crashes down right in the middle of them. Next thing that happens, they're all dead, with HER standing over their corpses, smoking gun in hand.
"I saw red. And through the red haze I saw it again and again. She enters the ruin. Looks around. Then nine shots, nine dead soldiers. All neatly shot through the head. Killing is what the tin cans are built for, and damn, are they good at it.
"My first thought was that she had gone bad. Reverted to her original programming. But as I grabbed my rifle and ran over there, I didn't give two shits about the why. That thing had just killed my friends, and I would have its blood or die trying."
"Did you realize that your platoon had been exposed to the very biological weapon your unit was assigned to destroy? That they would have been dead anyway? And that every second they lived increased the chance of them infecting others?"
"Saw the biohazard sign on the barrel, so yes, I figured some of that out on my way over there. It didn't matter, nothing mattered but that she had murdered nine of my best friends and for that she needed to die.
"As I reached the bombed-out house, Commander Phillips was still standing there. She had just sealed the goddamn barrel again. She heard me and turned around. 'The situation is contained, Sergeant Kruger.', she said, 'Bioengineered viral agents outside of a host or containment have an average life span of less than 5 minutes, due to the heightened ambient radiation levels stemming from Judgment Day. You're safe.'
She mustered me with those big brown eyes of hers. I would have sworn there was puzzlement on her face. She had just killed my platoon and she was wondering what I was doing there. My rage nearly choked me."
"Why? What made you so angry at Commander Phillips?"
The lack of comprehension in these words drove the traitor to his feet. "She stood between the corpses of nine men who had fought for her, would have died to fulfil her commands, and she had shot them! And she didn't care! She should have had the fucking decency to tremble, to doubt, to hesitate! She should have shown anything but that blank face! And she never gave them a chance! Maybe they could have been healed, or one of them wasn't infected, or …"
The screaming subsided. The effort of these words had left Kruger's voice cracked and rough, as he continued: "When I was able to do something again, I simply pulled the trigger. I didn't even take the time to aim. That thing in front of me was pure evil and it needed killing. I brought the gun around in a wide arc, aiming for her midriff. And then… I stopped."
Kruger hesitated, seemed to withdraw into himself. "Why?", asked his interrogator, but was answered by silence only. "Sergeant Kruger! Why did you stop shooting?", the interrogator insisted.
When Kruger began speaking again, he spoke to himself, telling himself the story again, as if he still couldn't believe it.
"You know, it's been thirteen years since Judgment Day. Some life starts to resurface. Trees, grass, weeds." A pause. "Flowers".
"There was a bed of flowers there. In the very house where my platoon was shot to death by their commanding officer, a little field of flowers grew in the cracks of the floor."
"I guess she must have picked one right at the second I started firing. She was staring at her, wide-eyed, as if in wonder. She frowned a bit even. That white speck of color in front of her pale face. Her eyes seemed to absorb the flower, to drink every detail of it. There was something in that scene that made me stop firing.
"I could hear her speaking to herself. 'Humans like to pick flowers.', she said, 'Flowers are terminated if picked. Terminating life inspires feelings of power in humans. Humans like feeling powerful. Do humans enjoy the picking of flowers because they enjoy terminating flowers?'
"That's when a dozen or so soldiers barrelled down on me. Half a day later, I landed here."
"What made you stop firing at Commander Phillips, Sergeant Kruger?"
"Man, I wish I knew what made me stop. If I had shot her, I would be able to sleep now."
"What do you mean?"
"What I saw, what she said that day … It scared me shitless. It told me, crystal-clear, that we're all going to die, even if we win this fucking war."
"Why?"
"Let me spell this out for you. Can you understand an intelligence so unfettered by emotions that it can make the cold decision to kill nine men because they need killing in a matter of seconds, act upon it, and reflect upon the moral implications of picking flowers afterwards? You can't, can you. We humans are ruled by emotions, that's now the fucking definition of being human. We can't even imagine such an intelligence, let alone understand it. We'll never be able to predict them.
"But they understand us. Humans aren't that hard to figure out. And next time when they get it in their head that the time for humanity is over, they will know us, know where to hit us, know how to break us.
"And we won't see it coming, again! And that will have been it. Pure Darwin. Unless we get rid of them all, while we still have the chance.
"But we won't do it. I know that. Even as I glimpsed the terrible perfection of her machine-born mind, another part of me was trying like crazy to pin a human emotion on the expression she was showing. And I KNOW they don't have emotions. We all are so determined to see them as humans, we'll never get rid of the ones who helped us. It would feel like a betrayal.
"And that is why we are all royally fucked."
With that Kruger fell silent. The interrogator seemed to have nothing else to say either. A door slammed. Nightfall came over the cell, and the empty eyes of a man without hope glimmered in the dying light.