For Tomorrow, Today

For Tomorrow, Today

The radio transmitter is obnoxiously loud in the hushed quiet of the bunker. A news anchor reports the weather, her voice muffled by the poor underground signal.

“Eastern front to expect a steady 13 degrees, dropping to as low as –12 at sunset.”

The air is thick with the pungent smell of sweat and gunpowder. Apex and his comrades lean heavily against the cold walls, their exhaustion palpable. Eighteen hours ago, what was supposed to be a simple reconnaissance mission scouting enemy android strongholds unravelled into chaos when one of their squadron members triggered an improvised explosive device. By the time they saw the wires of the bomb sticking out from beneath the sand, it was too late.

Flashes of gunshots from enemy fire. The acrid scent of burning flesh mixing with melting metal. Apex had moved through the makeshift trenches with unnerving precision. Even in battle, he remained precise and calculating. His fingers did not tremble. His breath did not falter. He could predict enemy movements before they happened and adjust his bullets’ trajectory without blinking. One momentary miscalculation had left him with a hole in his side. He patched himself up in the darkness of the bunker, tugging thread through his skin with a needle blackened by the flame of a match.

Now Apex’s wound is but a dull throb, no longer open and weeping. Soon, it will harden and turn to scar tissue, forever embalmed next to his other scars that map the path of war across his skin.

In one corner of the bunker, Kid, Romeo and Bones are huddled over a poker game, their hands filled with damp playing cards. They gamble with old bullet casings that clink against the concrete floor.

Kid’s hands tremble slightly. As his nickname suggests, he is young. Too young to have been conscripted. Can’t be more than seventeen, skin still spotted from puberty, voice still soft and high, limbs long and thin as a deer. He must have lied about his age when he enlisted, which isn’t hard to get away with when they’re desperate for numbers. Bones is the antithesis - old and withered, both rage and time embodied in a skin hardened by war. Drafted to Vietnam, and then now here. The unlucky bastard. He brought the pack of playing cards from his old life to pass the time. Says that if the bullets don’t kill you, the waiting will.

Romeo holds his cards with fingers that that are charred and blistered from flame. Every night in the darkness, he strikes matches for light. Just long enough to quickly squint at an old, faded photograph of a woman as the flame singes his flesh. Match after match, Apex watches, breathing slowly to keep the ruse of slumber until he can almost remember his own family. His Ma, Pa and little brother exist now only as glimpses of memory: his mother’s soft hands, his brother’s laugh, the taste of his father’s stew. So much time has passed, so much has changed, that he can’t be certain that he hasn’t just made them up entirely. He falls asleep each night to the image of their distorted faces, forever out of reach.

***

Days pass inside the bunker, but it feels like months. The news comes on a day like all others.

Kid and Bones are playing cards, taking their turn at solitaire. Romeo is propped up next to Apex, almost passed out and leaning his temple against his AUG-A3 rifle. Every so often, his eyes fall shut, and his head tilts forward momentarily before it jerks upright again. It is a rhythm that Apex can predict. He has learnt the pattern, as repetitive as the ticking of a clock. Each jerk of Romeo’s head is a second, another mark on the passing of time that does not seem to exist from inside the blank bunker walls.

Apex is still watching Romeo on the edge of sleep when the radio crackles, and a voice comes over the airwaves. 

“URGENT MILITARY BROADCAST...” 

Apex reaches for the small portable receiver at his feet and turns the volume up.

“…recent discoveries on android behaviour. Researchers at the Institute have found newer enemy models are exhibiting human-like responses to certain stimuli...”

Bones scoffs as he draws a card from the pile before him. “The bastards are evolving.”

Romeo, awoken by the radio broadcast, grunts. “If they are, then what the hell are we even fighting for?”

“’For tomorrow, today.’” Apex mumbles the infamous slogan. FOR TOMORROW, TODAY, printed on every poster, plastered on every building across the country. 

“What a fucking joke,” Bones replies.

“They say we’re fighting for a better world. One free from android occupation,” Kid recites as though reading from a teleprompter, voice cracking on every second word.

“And you believe them?” Bones sneers, “Who do you think made the goddamn robots, Kid? Not whatever mysterious enemy we’re fighting. No, they were born and bred in this country. Manufactured in the same factories that supply the very weapons we use.” He gestures to Romeo’s rifle, playing cards forgotten and splayed across the floor. “And now not only do they look like us, but they think like us too. They may as well be us.”

“Bones, cool it,” Apex interrupts sternly, noticing Kid’s pale and horrified look, but he wants to say more. To reassure them that the androids could never become like them. That they were not made by the same people they are fighting for. He wants to tell them not to worry, to keep their heads down and continue fighting ‘for tomorrow’s today’. But how can he be certain that what he speaks is even the truth anymore?

“Just sayin’ what everyone’s thinking,” Bones mutters.

Apex’s head falls back against the cold concrete, his skull thudding with an echo that stings his teeth. He lets his eyes drift shut for just a moment, feeling the hollow chill as it seeps through his uniform and into his skin. There is a strange sort of comfort in the ache. 

After a while, Kid’s voice spills out – unnatural against the comfortable stillness that had settled between the squadron since the broadcast had ended.

“Do you think they can feel pain?” He stares blankly toward the far wall, as if replaying every time his own bullets had torn through their metal bodies. As if it were the first time he had even thought about it.

Apex watches him. There is a softness in Kid’s face, something delicate threaded through his voice. A gentle innocence that has not yet been crushed under the heavy boot of the war. 

“I don’t know,” Apex says finally. “Feels like I don’t know anything anymore.” 

The admission is a quiet sort of defeat. Bones snorts faintly from the corner.

But Kid nods, slowly. “I broke my arm once,” he says. “Couple years ago. Fell out of a tree, the bone snapped straight in half.” He lifts his hand absently and rests it against his forearm. He squeezes, almost as if he were trying to re-snap the bone. “I remember the pain, mostly. I remember it was the most human I’d ever felt.”

Kid continues, speaking words into the silence. “Thought an injury like that would stop me from being able to enlist. Figured they’d declare me medically unfit.” A small, humourless, laugh escapes him. “But they didn’t even care. Barely even read my medical history, looked right through me as they stamped the papers.”

“Sounds about right,” Bones scoffs, and Kid glances over at him.

 “What about you? What did you do before…?” Kid gestures vaguely in the air, as if the word war were too heavy to say aloud. As if speaking it into existence made it more real than it already was. 

“Worked in a garage,” Bones says. “Fixing engines all day.”

“Engines?”

“Cars and bikes, mostly. Used to fill streets with them. Funny thing is most of that crap’s been scavenged. Just spare parts now, for something that wants to kill me.”

“I worked in a bakery… before,” Romeo says quietly, almost to himself. “Made bread, mainly.”

Kid’s eyes are wide as they flick toward Romeo. “Sounds nice,” he says softly, and the tip of his tongue pokes out from between his lips, as if he can taste the memory.

“Yeah,” Romeo replies, “the real stuff, too. Not that dry, rationed shit. And, during the holidays, we’d fill the loaves with all sorts of fruit and nuts and chocolate. We’d give out free samples, and the customers would bite into them and smile. I liked that. I liked seeing people enjoy what I’d made with my own hands.”

Apex lets the vision settle. Romeo, with flour underneath his nails instead of gunpowder. Bones, with streaks of grease across his skin rather than blood. Kid, with his casted arm held high, grinning, and stubbornly alive.

He sees them, as they had been, and not as they currently are. The weight of the war has carved them into something far smaller and, for a brief and fleeting moment, the fear falls away. They are boys again, alive and human.

But the broadcast's words still buzz in the back of Apex’s skull. The androids are evolving.

Apex remembers learning about the theory of evolution from his mother, before the war stole what remained of his life. She had been, after all, a biologist, before she was a mother, and she had taught him all he knew. 

But thinking about her is difficult. He can see the vague forms of remembrance, can feel the truth of her presence as if it were just on the other side of a veil. But his archive of distorted memory has blunt teeth that sinks into his mind every time he pushes himself to think past the superficial recollection. To remember anything other than mere fragments of before. The shape of his mother’s hands, her narrow wrists and squared-off nail beds. 

Remembering the science, though, comes easier. And so, the theory of evolution sits at the forefront of his mind. Life comes forth from life, and sometimes, it changes just enough in the right way so that it sticks. 

But how can human life come forth from a pile of screws and metal? 

The androids have evolved to mimic humanity so perfectly they are becoming indistinguishable from the real thing. Living consciousnesses stuffed inside mechanical exoskeletons.

Apex’s mind is a battlefield. Realisation after realisation feeding the breath of revelation that no longer lays dormant in his subconscious. It has been uncovered and refuses to retreat. Survival used to feel like a choice, an act of free will, but he has been honed for war. Programmed by higher command to fight with unnerving mechanical precision and without question.

The bunker is quiet once again, the radio a low static hum. 

Apex sits in the dark, surrounded by concrete, metal, and boys too young to die, and wonders if androids contemplate the same. If they huddle in their bunkers, argue about war and biology. If they desperately light matches to see their lovers face before they dream. If they feel the pain from a blunt bullet tearing through their skin. If, inside their code, there lies fragments of memory, buried somewhere underneath all their wires and circuitry. The caress of a mother’s touch, a boy’s laugh, the taste of stew.