Crysis: Legion

Crysis: Legion

MANHATTAN IS UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT. THEY’RE NOT FROM AROUND HERE.   Welcome to the Big Apple, son. Welcome to the city that never sleeps: invaded by monstrous fusions of meat and machinery, defended by a private army that makes Blackwater look like the Red Cross, ravaged by a disfiguring plague that gifts its victims with religious rapture while it eats them alive. You’ve been thrown into this meat grinder without warning, without preparation, without a clue. Your whole squad was mowed down the moment they stepped onto the battlefield. And the chorus of voices whispering in your head keeps saying that all of this is on you: that you and you alone might be able to turn the whole thing around if you only knew what the hell was going on. You’d like to help. Really you would. But it’s not just the aliens that are gunning for you. Your own kind hunts you as a traitor, and your job might be a bit easier if you didn’t have the sneaking suspicion they could be right. . . . Biologist, author, and convicted felon, Peter Watts (author of Blindsight and the Rifters trilogy)  appears to be especially popular with people who have never met him. At least, pretty much every award his work has received comes from overseas (with the exception of a recent Hugo, which probably won on a sympathy vote in the wake of recent encounters with the Department of Homeland Security).  His science fiction, oddly enough, has been used as a core text in science and philosophy courses as well as the usual gamut of sf electives;  he only wishes his actual science had been taken half as seriously, back in the day.  Both he and his cat have appeared in the prestigious journal Nature . 1 The thing is, I thought it was all our fault. It's not that far off from what the Greens have been whining about since the last goddamn century. Global warm--sorry, anthropogenic climate change. Tidal waves, rising sea levels, half the planet's population wandering around looking for a place to crash since their homes got flooded out. There's malaria in the Baltic now, did you know that? A tropical disease. In the fucking Baltic. And somehow South America turned into bloody Siberia when no one was looking, something about melting icepacks short-circuiting the ocean currents. The whole world's fighting over fresh water like a pack of starving dogs with one stripped bone among them, and then Brazil started shooting all those sulfates into the stratosphere and--well, it was turning out just like the environazis said, only way worse and way fucking faster. None of the really nasty stuff was supposed to happen for another forty or fifty years, right? So we're fucked, and it looks like we fucked ourselves, and all the alarmist whitecoats we shat on before are telling us it's too late now, it's all planetary thermal inertia and unstable breakpoints and big ships turn slowly. There's no way to keep the place from blowing up but maybe we can at least contain the explosion a bit, you know? Try to keep the peace, share whatever's left of the loaves and fishes, keep the worst of the riots from hitting the good ol' US of A. Maintain some kind of order. That's why I signed up. That's why all of us did. We'd fucked things up by snarfing pork rinds and playing video games while the world turned to shit, and joining the marines was-I don't know. Penance. A chance to make amends. Except it wasn't us after all, not really, not yet. It was these fuckers from outer space, it was that bloody cryo weapon of theirs, that secret run-in way over in fucking China. We may have primed the avalanche, but Ling Shan was the snowball that started it rolling. And that was just a skirmish, that was so small they even managed to cover it up. A presidential directive or two, a few strategic pulse bombs to fry seismo and satcam, maybe a handful of surgical kills to take care of any Koreans out fishing in the wrong place at the wrong time. All you're left with is a few fuzzy rumors so whacked that not even Fox News would stoop low enough to run with them. Then when the whole world starts listing to starboard a couple of months down the road, you blame it all on greedy shortsighted humans and their damn fossil- fuel economy. But it was just a skirmish, Roger, and you know what? So's this. -N2-2 Alcatraz/Prophet (tentative desig.-awaiting update), excerpted from Manhattan Incursion Debrief 27/08/2023 PROPHECY Voice-mike intercept, Forensic Debrief, Manhattan Incursion Subject ID: Unknown (code name Alcatraz) 27/08/2023 Laurence Barnes, I think. Prophet. Alcatraz, then. Whatever. It doesn't matter. Of course I know the stats: I'm dead, not senile. Name, rank, serial number. Doesn't mean shit. That's not who I am anymore. I'm the guy being debriefed by a low-level functionary because his bosses are too chickenshit to risk being in the same room, that's who. You expect me to think you volunteered for this gig? You think the higher-ups wanted to bring you into the loop, you