Science Fiction Short Stories

The Art of War

Jeremy Jones, if this letter finds you, I'll try to do some explaining.

I disappeared 25 years ago--five years your timeline, one of many unexplained disappearances. We were playing paintball in the park and you never found me. I had just hit you with a green paintball. You were looking for me but I was hiding behind a tree when they ported in from 2198 and grabbed me and a couple others. I was a random grab, but it caused some trouble in their time.

I guess you could say the world is at war in 2196, considering there is only one army--President-for-Life Martin Jones artificial intelligence army of drones, robots, androids, and the Jones Mainframe, aka Comnet. Jones and the OverLords took over the world without a battle. 

We surviving humans are basically prisoners of war, every part of our lives mandated by Jones and his AI. What and how much we eat, where we live, who we have children with--if we have them, our labor (POWs are not workers), our health care, how long we survive--can't call it life. Jones and the OverLords live on the best this beaten old world has left and even have a youth restoration serum. They'll live for centuries.

Take another street to work, and a drone stings you. You don't want to get stung twice. Kiss a girl not assigned to your genes, and one of you goes to the asteroid mines. Jones and the Lords have spread out in the solar system.

I'm a little lucky. Martin Jones is my grand-nephew, so I have it better. That's why I can send this letter. My computer skills (and nepotism) got me assigned to the Jones Mainframe, where there are no oversight drones, etc., but no way to sabotage, either. 

You see, you finally caved in and married that kooky roboticist, Anne, last week. You think Jeremy, Jr., needs a mother. My sympathies for the passing of his mother. You and the kook will have a daughter, Sybil. Sybil will have Martin, who took his grandmother's robotics and programs and rules the world. We have no one capable of hacking Comnet. 

Timelines are funny. I don't know if you change things, and it wouldn't get me back home anyway. Just, maybe, you can help raise Martin so he's not a sociopathic narcissist, but I think they're born, not made. I don't even know what this world will be like if Comnet doesn't run things.

I have to send this letter now, or get caught. If I'm lucky, I'd be on an asteroid. Maybe the same one as Leila. Probably not. They're on to stuff like that.

To prove this letter is from me, I've enclosed a picture of us at the start of that last paintball game. No paintball games now. Your brother, Rob.

(handwritten note) My vasectomy was successful. Jeremy, Jr. will be my only child. Just in case. Jeremy, Sr.