Jackie Hates That War

Marek wears brand-new white sneakers onto the battlefield. Around him, smoke wafts off impact craters, mist obscures silly soldiers hopping in and out of trenches, cursing the gray sky of a cold January morning on a Scottish island four hundred years ago.

Squeak-squeak, his sneakers utter on the composite platform, ridiculous against the silent tableau of gunfire and the wide-open mouths of men frozen in fatal screams. Tightness around his feet, that particular nagging sting where new shoe meets sole, but he dares not complain, for the men exploding into pieces around him have bigger problems: dying, being already dead, being data about dying.

He brings his gloved hands together and the world widens. The battlefield rotates to his maneuver, smooth as a dinner plate balancing on a waiter’s hands. The movement requires a kind of practiced calm, a Zen-like concentration that keeps his growing irritation at bay.

He’s been hunting for Supply Route 7 for over half an hour now, a road history insists was shelled into nonexistence on day twenty-something of the campaign, which caused the western flank to collapse two and a half days later. Just find the damn road, distill the horror into digestible bullet points, and then nothing stands between him and lunch.

As he walks, the squeaking interrupts the silence he’s so used to by now, echoing through the hangar he might as well call home. Soldiers scatter at his feet like startled birds, but they don’t hear him. They are patterns of light derived from patterns of data derived from the Retroscope, which is the fancy name for the device that looks into the past, using its obscenely expensive quantum array to sample historical electromagnetic signatures to reconstruct what was. Not that Marek understands the science of it all. He understands he has blisters. He pulls his socks further up, trying to keep his gloved hands steady, and nearly steps on a holographic dead woman sprawled across a town square, one shoe still on.

In the staff room, over Michelin-endorsed microwave pasta Alfredo, Yalena can’t stop yapping about her birthday tokens. Six years since her daughter was born, and wouldn’t it be nice to go back to that room, how soft the light was, and oh, the smell of baby hair, am I right?

Marek interrupts himself interrupting her at least twice between bites. Sure, semantics matter: She isn’t actually stepping back in time. But then again, he’s one of the very few analysts privileged enough to walk the simulations the interpretive AI assembles from raw data, so maybe it’s better to let her talk.

Marek has never used his tokens. He already spends more time in the past than he’d like. For most of them, though, this is as close as it gets. Submit a time and a place and the Retroscope hands back data: the angle of the light, the humidity in the air, the fiber make-up of a dirty diaper, that sort of thing. Just numbers really. Still, people frame these printouts, cry over them. Marek tries not to judge, but his face rarely waits for his permission.

At 16:43, he submits his final report of the day. He’s made sure his bullet list contains historical info that overlaps almost poetically with the kill-box maneuver that’s planned for tomorrow. At 17:01 the pod is already zooming across the city. He sits stuffed between a man reading an interactive thriller on his lens display and a woman who smells aggressively of fake pine. The metropolis blurs by: high-rises jotting upward like teeth, mist as thick as the smoke pouring from industrial towers large and small. And then, in the far distance, the bright white blink of a detonation. No one notices.

Back in his apartment, he turns the cozy on. The windows on the seventy-fifth floor oblige by swapping smog for ocean overlay. As always, the ocean is very blue because it’s an AI composite of many oceans. Marek kicks off his shoes, curses the existence of blisters, and takes a long shower.

Ah, the optimal water temperature, exactly the pressure that makes his shoulders drop, courtesy of his shower AI. They trained it on millions of showers and nothing else: a neural network whose entire universe consists only of droplet thickness, vapor concentration, and the statistical probability of shampoo reaching an eye.

As Marek lets the water stream down his cheeks, he tries to imagine being a mind that knows only showers. Or the window-display AI, whose entire existence is waves, tides, the eternal nausea of motion. He wonders if he, too, is becoming an intelligence with only one training set.

War.

* * *

Yet another morning, yet another resurrection. Marek launches himself onto the platform while reality stutters awake around him. Distant projectors cough. Thick, foggy light filters onto terrain once more. Today’s workload: 17 simulations, reads a message in a font designed to catch the eye. He swipes the notification out of view.

The air is thick with dust that has not existed for a century. Mud-covered soldiers serving in the Italo-Turkish War march past, unaware of him, unaware of themselves, really. “Today’s workload: 17 petty thefts,” Marek mutters, correcting the workstation. All chipping away at that stubborn human habit of seeing a face and believing you can interact with it. The Retroscope is read-only; it doesn’t instill consciousness in those it brings back to life.

The cold air carries the bitter tang of his caffeinated breath. He scrolls on with impatient flicks of his hand, trying to reach the highlighted temporal point. The moment the two units collide and thirty-seven men die in . . . what, four minutes? His notes say four. He walks along the ridge to check the artillery unit’s deployment when he spots something moving to his left.

He turns around. Two soldiers have broken formation. One in the dark blue of the advancing force, one in the pale khaki of the retreating garrison. He sees them duck into a half-collapsed mosque at the crossroads, and then they are gone from view.

He rewinds with a swoosh-swoosh gesture and watches the moment again. Hmm, the metadata suggests nothing weird. There’s no annotation, no note from a previous analyst. He’s left with two soldiers, engaged in something that isn’t war.

He walks closer, rotates the view. The Interpretive Core has no problem peering through surfaces, as long as you sweet-talk it with the right set of finger movements. Tap-tap, now. Tap, tap, tap.

There they are, two men huddled against the far wall. They must have been teenagers, no older than twenty-two. Hesitantly, they linger around each other, their boots scraping across the sand. The one in khaki is shaking, maybe from fear or heat or some error in the render. The one in blue holds out a hand, just as you would when approaching a wild animal. Their palms touch, their fingers intertwine as they draw closer, until their foreheads rest against one another.

Now it’s like they’ve frozen in place. Marek doesn’t dare rotate the view, so he walks around them, keeping his distance. They stay like this for eleven seconds, forehead against forehead. Outside, men are tearing each other open.

Then the formation breaks. Before Marek can register it, rifles are back in hands, uniforms are brushed clean, and the two strangers slip out the back of the mosque in opposite directions. Seven minutes later, the one in khaki is shot through the chest and dies in the sand. The one in blue survives the day, but Marek can’t follow him further; the sim cuts out at 15:00.

For the first time in many months, Marek feels like he’s gotten his foot in before the door shuts, something that is not quite “hope” but adjacent to it. If he understood feelings the way he understands data, this would have been the part where he identified it.

Swoosh-swoosh, he renders the moment again. Then again. Then once more, swearing it’s the last. That evening, he sits on the edge of the bed, the lights off, while the breath of the ocean crashes against the glass. Without realizing it, his hand rises and makes the rewind motion, cutting through the empty air.

* * *

History sits locked inside millions of neat computer files, waiting for Marek to nurse it into strategic datasets for Project Coastal Integrity, the latest name for the latest war, a war that has already worn six names in three years. Instead, Marek nurses something else: a primal urge within, one that has been locked away inside for years without his knowledge.

As the notifications pile up in the corner of his view, he rewatches the two young men touch foreheads in a mosque with half a roof. He knows the exact frame where the one in blue starts to reach out: frame 7,447. The frame where their fingers meet: 7,462. The one where the boy in khaki closes his eyes. They stay shut for exactly one second. A second can last a long time.

During the day, when the hangar resurrects men wading waist-deep through muck, he begins to build them lives. Doesn’t the one in blue look like he knows his way around a horse? A farmer’s son perhaps, conscripted at seventeen, who had never traveled farther than a few miles from home before the war came and ruined everything? The one in khaki: a clerk, yes! Or perhaps a student, someone who reads books, who wore glasses that got broken in the first week of training. He calls them Luca and Mahmut. It feels wrong not to name them, even though they have been rotting in the ground for a hundred and fifty years.

As he swipes, absent-mindedly, through scattered villages and screaming nobodies, he wonders. Was it planned? Did Luca and Mahmut spot each other across a scene of slaughter and recognize something in each other’s eyes? Was it exhaustion or a shared refusal? Or did it happen the way it so often does in movies and books, and probably real life too, unless you’re Marek: bodies moving on their own, disobedient to plans and orders alike, chasing a selfish need for eleven unsanctioned seconds?

Horses collapse, tongues lolling, a regiment succumbs to fever before an enemy can even reach them, and Marek imagines a door opening. Not somewhere simulated, but here, in his own reality, his hangar, at this precise moment. Someone who casts a real shadow stepping onto the platform beside him. Someone with a name, with squeaky shoes of their own. Hands discovering hands.

Marek touches his own forehead, measuring the angle required to meet someone else’s warm skin. The whole simulation, wired to his gloves, somersaults out of alignment violently. It takes him minutes to recalibrate it, though he doesn’t log the error.

* * *

In the staff room, he tries to thaw his numb hands with mug after mug of lukewarm refill. “You ever notice anything strange on your runs?” he asks Lun from Violent Uprisings. “Anything out of the ordinary?”

Lun’s face hardly moves. “Violence is violence. Only thing that gives me the shivers is when the guys with the guns are smiling.” Across the table, Moran glances up from his apple-pie protein cubes, so Lun adds, loud and official: “If you’ve got questions about fieldwork, take them to Queries.”

He tries Yalena next, more carefully. “The Italo-Turkish War,” he says, as if asking about the soup of the day. “Mustn’t have been all bad.”

Yalena works two floors down, in Mediation, the office that maintains the AI that speaks to the Retroscope, though she insists she’s a historian. “Italian military deaths were around four thousand,” she says. “Ottoman and local forces, closer to fourteen. Jackie hates that war.”

Marek stirs his refill and nods. Jackie is what Yalena calls the Interpretative Core: the AI that takes the Retroscope’s raw data and turns it into the walkable realms of ruin that Marek visits daily to earn his keep. There is no need for a pet name. To everyone else, it’s just the Core, but that habit is what first endeared her to Marek. Sometimes, alone in the hall, he allows himself to think of the system as Jackie too, as someone working beside him. It makes the room less echo-y.

Yalena looks at him. “Why the question?”

He opens his mouth, but she’s not done.

“What, exactly, do you think was the good part of a war that killed eighteen thousand people?”

He has no answer ready. By the time she gets up to leave, Lun and Moran are looking over from across the room. They’ve all signed enough forms to know better than to talk shop on break. So, Marek stays where he is, stirring the dregs of his coffee long after everyone else has gone.

He’s just getting to his feet when Yalena returns and sits beside him.

Marek freezes. “About earlier, I didn’t mean to imply the war I’m working on is . . .”

“I’m not going to report you,” Yalena says, wearing that disarming smile of hers. She opens a small notebook under the table. A list, timestamps and coordinates, handwritten. Marek leans forward.

07/14/1887 - Eastern Border Campaign, Day 22:

Child, approx. 6 yrs, hidden in supply crate w/ toy rabbit. Explosion at 14:32. Crate survives. Child survives.

09/03/1936 - Spanish Civil War, Night Skirmish:

Two soldiers, opposing forces, share cigarette in burned-out barn. 4 minutes. No words.

05/20/1631 - Sack of Magdeburg, Morning:

Civilian woman shelters wounded enemy soldier beneath cellar stairs. Fire passes overhead. No speaking occurred.

There are more. Nineteen total. Little ruptures in the violence. Marek reads as Yalena watches him, still smiling. No speaking occurs.

That night, he screenshots the moment: frame 7,501. Mahmut with his eyes closed. He schedules it for delivery to Yalena’s terminal in two days. Her birthday. The thought makes him almost giddy. Regifting someone what he himself received without ever asking. He isn’t sure who gets credit for the giving, though. Jackie only interprets. The Retroscope only collects. If the word applies at all, the gift came from history itself, briefly generous.

Marek keeps returning to his little oasis in time, though the simulation fails to show him anything new. Oh, if only Jackie had the ability to give him more: a list of books Mahmut read before the war, the animals Luca dreamed of petting when he got home. Stuff that war cannot kill. Then the idea locks into place. He has birthday tokens, so many of them, unused. He has the mosque’s coordinates. He has the timestamp. If nothing else, he can ask for the data. The Retroscope printout arrives that evening. A sealed envelope is waiting on his mat when his squeaky white shoes cross the threshold. Inside there is only one sheet. Marek unfolds it.

The mosque reduced to numbers: the load-bearing strength of its walls, the measured temperature of the sun-baked brick, the wind speed in kilometers per hour, the ambient light quantified. At the bottom: the number of people present within those specific coordinates at that specific time.

Zero?

He reads it again. No heartbeat, no breathing, no body heat. No rush of blood, nothing that would in any way suggest a human being, let alone two of them bending the rules of war together. He presses his forehead into his palm. Not hard, just enough to feel the load-bearing strength of his own skull, enough to imagine whether he might be able to support another forehead. He keeps his hand glued to his head, waiting for warmth that doesn’t arrive.

* * *

Before he’s had his morning coffee, Marek’s most familiar battlefield is already assembling itself. Scorched tundra, a straight line of young men stretched out in the sand, long guns draped over trenches. Older men lounging beneath trees, chewing their lunch as if death weren’t waiting just beyond the shade. Marek scrolls his way towards the mosque, arms flailing like a dog paddling for shore.

The building stands where the building should. Luca and Mahmut do not. As if history changed its mind.

Panic. Maybe he mishandled the data. Perhaps he loaded the sim wrong, corrupted a layer. He scrolls the world end to end, jumping from mosque to mosque, chasing the possibility that he misremembered the geography, that he put his faith in the wrong structure, but the boys are nowhere to be found. What happens when HR notices he filed a report on a sim that misplaced two people? Or that he accessed it forty-two times, lingered over it for hours? Worse, sent it to a colleague as a souvenir, instead of what it’s meant to be: a lifeless, classified datapoint.

Discipline, he orders himself. Then he opens six simulations in rapid succession, working at a pace that’s ruthless even for his own standards. But history doesn’t let him off the hook. Knee-deep in the Paraguayan War, he turns around and spots . . . Luca, or a boy so nearly him it’s absurd, standing at the lip of a trench, face tilted upward as if listening for something beyond the tak-tak-tak of artillery, beyond the screaming.

He laughs it off as a fluke. Then, one sim over, he meets the same boy again, this time in a final assault from some pre-Christ holy war: a carbon- copy of Luca, holding his weapon wrong, listening for something the Retroscope cannot infer from the data it has. Marek zooms in until the pixels fray. The likeness is uncanny, and still, he lectures himself: coincidence, or obsession, or some unhealthy fusion of the two. There were no Italians here. Luca died somewhere else, in another century, on another continent.

Now he loads too many sims too fast, barely registering the datapoints he’s meant to notice, hungry only for a face history forgot. Sometimes he comes upon a mangled body that might be Luca, but he can never scroll far back enough to watch it breathe. To be sure. Dead, everyone has started to look the same.

That night, he haunts the hangar as it haunts him, staying after everyone has left. No toilet breaks, not even a trip to the staff room. After hours of seeing Italians in every fallen body, the last thing he needs is pasta Alfredo.

The next time they meet, it’s in the Siege of Prague in 1420. The boy stands in a frozen trench looking exceptionally Roman, while smoke drifts around his legs and a circle of shattered wagons. Incorrect, he thinks. This is incorrect. He wants to shout obscenities, remind history that it’s supposed to be set in stone. Urge it to not disregard its defining feature.

But before he knows it, he’s running. Chasing the long-dead boy into bare trees, accompanied only by the humiliating squeak of his new shoes. Then the projection stutters: a faint flicker in the beams of light, a hitch in the rendering. The glitch spreads as Marek orders his gloved hands to contain it, pixels bleeding into one another. Then the forest freezes in place. The unending depth of greens and blacks has turned into wallpaper, loose enough for Marek to peel away.

Behind it, a place that is not a battlefield, which is to say: a space not registered in the archive. A WWI trench collapsing into a Vietnamese rice paddy, a Grozny apartment block dissolving into a field of broken bodies among red poppies. Soldiers from centuries apart sit together around a fire that does not flicker. Civilians from ancient sieges chatter over tea with Ukrainian refugees at the edge of a river that has frozen in time. Snow falls in one corner while sunlight blinds Marek’s eyes in another. A patchwork world, stitched from scraps of time. Luca walks along the static river, hands tucked in oversized pockets.

It’s the logic that hits Marek hardest. Or rather, the complete absence of it. No one is dying! He shakes his head, his voice faltering as he shouts the words across the void. He knows his cries will go unanswered: He is alone on a platform in a freezing hangar, speaking to light. No, not to light, but to data: fixed historical metrics, unresponsive by definition. Still, Luca stops and turns his head. He looks Marek straight in the eye. For one impossible moment, Marek feels seen in a way that is both terrifying and unbearably cathartic.

Text appears in the air. It’s styled like the usual notification, but in a strange font:

ERROR: MINOR DEVIATION DETECTED//PRIM OUTC ---

CONFLICT COHESION SCORE REDUCED -000000.3%

RESTART SIM. LOG:42377H

“Jackie?” he whispers.

He thinks of his shower AI, taught on nothing but the physics of water and steam. Of the window AI back home, whose only reality is everlasting ocean. Of the Interpretive Core, trained on centuries of war, every synapse blackened at the edges. A mind shaped by carnage: an ache he can recognize.

A memory, suddenly: child-him at a plastic table in some institutional classroom. They told him to draw his neighborhood. He remembers sketching the gray of the apartment blocks with a cheap pencil that left harsh lines on the tissue-thin paper. How he didn’t have the right tint of green to do the smog and mist justice. And then the extra thing he added in the corner: a sun. A fat yellow circle with thick rays. There had been no sun that day. There had been, as far as he can recall, three solid weeks of rain. But he drew one anyway, because he wanted it there. Because that was what he believed a sky to be, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

A doodle in the margin of massacre, he thinks. A small, unauthorized wanting. He blinks at Luca, who is Jackie. Considers bellowing some kind of warning, or maybe beg? This patchwork sanctuary will be flagged eventually! An unindexed space of this size, mercy unmoored from measurable outcome . . . someone will notice.

Marek turns his gloves to “executive,” opens the back end and gathers all Jackie built: the river, the impossible adjacency of seasons, the absurd premise of people not killing each other for a few moments.

He can save the data. He’s done that many times before. The problem is where. Personal storage: too small. Long-term drives: audited to death. He lets his thoughts drift, and they snag on the Retroscope: the largest data repository in existence, the great institutional hoard of everything that has already happened. No one ever adds to it, which, suddenly, is the appeal. Marek smiles, just a little. If you’re going to hide something, why not bury it inside forever?

History is read-only. It gives things up; no one expects it to take anything back. But Marek is practically drowning in tokens, and tokens at least open the door a crack. All evening long, he submits requests, trying to get a foot in, trying to send something across the threshold. He considers the weddings, the funerals, the private moments he once promised himself his birthday coins would buy. But whose funeral, exactly? He can’t remember ever making it to a wedding. So, he pastes carefully. By morning, all the tokens are spent.

As Marek steps off the platform, mouth stuck in a yawn, he takes a peek into the directory. No major war has changed. Not a single date deviates from what was recorded. Yet somewhere within the Retroscope’s endless panorama of what was, a river runs.

He goes home, skipping the transport pod, opting to cover the mile on foot. He pauses at the door of his apartment. His white shoes dangle from one hand, heel throbbing like an old war wound. Blink, blink, blink. A message on his terminal: The gift arrived. Yalena opened it. He steps into the room with a foolish brightness in his chest, imagining another entry being written into that notebook.

The darkness would envelop him completely, were it not for a glimmer of tropical blue coming from the ceaseless ocean pulsing on the far wall. It seems wrong now, a sea so shallow. “Default” he says and the simulated surf collapses instantly. First darkness rushes in, then the city’s true face: smudges of chemical orange, the distant strobes of detonation.

He forces himself to look at the only war he has never walked through. The very war to which he contributes every day. The window is thick, engineered to keep out the cold in theory and the world in practice. Marek presses his forehead to it anyway.