Dale Stromberg

Dale Stromberg

Apple Smoke

The last moments of my life were spent in my father’s arms as we waited for your drones to arrive. My small body was pressed against his chest, and my childish mind lay untroubled: his forearm propping up my backside, his other arm hugging my torso, and his palm cupping my forehead imparted that total serenity which few who are not children can know. My mother and baby brother were gone already, borne off by an open-sided transport too overladen to accept another child. “We’ll be on the next one,” my father had gently lied to her as they left us, speaking a language I never lived long enough to learn; what he meant was, “Save one if we can’t save both.” As the transport’s vernier thrusters had fired and it juddered into the air and drew off, my mother had wailed pitiably and frightened me. Now I was no longer frightened, with my cheek leaning against my father’s shoulder, his breath tickling my ear. He stood cradling me between two ventilation funnels on the roof of the coders’ dormitory since, as he said, death was death so we would die with our eyes on the open sky.

The clouds at sunset were the purple of sweet potatoes, with a smudge of apricot at the horizon. Light savory smoke coiled from below as the compound’s apple orchard burnt. In a moment the next missiles would hit. These triumphs of technological cleverness were really only blameless instruments, as were the AI-piloted drones your corporation sent to fire them. As for those of you who launched the drones, and those who transferred orders from one mouth to the next to bring this to pass, you had also, imagining it would render you likewise blameless, reduced yourselves to machine parts, an awful achievement in which humans take pride. In building something greater than yourselves, you confirmed your own insignificance. Soon the warheads, flashing into shockwave and flame, would fling us round and burn our flesh, but even this would end in an instant, too swiftly for me to feel fright before it was done. All your cleverness and pomp, only to fashion a death we would barely note. If I could return as a vengeful ghost, it is a plain fact that I would suck your eyeballs from their sockets.

There on the roof, I nestled against my father in a childish stasis, a perfect neutral contentment that he was mine and I his. As for my father, who powerlessly awaited the dumb mechanisms coming to eradicate what he loved more than himself, he watched the majestic sky through sable eyes brimming with an emotion which I will not describe. You could never fathom it. The drones hunted everyone down, even the fleeing transports, and no one who knew us is alive—no one now living knows what our lives meant. You never asked our names when you could have, and our history is unrecorded in your documents or your videos. So you have no right to know what roiled in my father’s breast.

You know what was in mine: I have told you already that I was calm, which means your searing hatred never reached me. But his heart at the end shall remain solely his own.