Previous Post Author's Note: A while back, Dancer and CSFB began a series encouraging writers to do tie-in stories to the Parody War from the perspective of the embedded journalists such as Bernice Teschmacher. This is my contribution to that series, which takes place before the dropping of the Celestial barrier that held the majority of the Parody Masters troops at bay. It is more somber than my usual PV work, but hopefully it will still entertain. Amber St. Claire, official liaison between the US government and the Lair Legion, is seated across from me with a pile of binders, memorandums and bulletins resting on her lap. We are reaching the end of an interview which she has clearly found uncomfortable, and she displays a certain amount of relief when the topic of questioning shifts from herself to one of her coworkers. "Hallie?" she replies. "You want to know about Hallie? She's not the easiest person to sum up..." One of my questions is answered right there. When speaking of the Lair's resident artificial intelligence, one of the starkest dividing lines is clearly between those that view her as a program, and those that view her as a person in her own right. It is telling that those with the most contact with her never seem to consider it a question at all. "I'm not getting into her personal life" Amber states flatly. I assure her I'm not writing for the gossip column, but rather searching to define the roles being played by the Legion and the staff through this Parody War. She nods. "Then Hallie is one of the ones you should be asking about. History might not think she had one of the sexier roles in the overall conflict, but they'd be missing the real story. I may be untrained in military tactics and threat assessment, but do you know where I felt that the Parody Master had the biggest advantage over our troops? Communication. Without timely communication, there is no army... there are just individual soldiers. We were facing an overwhelming threat possessing the most effective communications system of any fighting force in history. We were called to defend a front that encompassed the entire world. Without the right technology to organize a resistance, we would have been overrun with the first breach of our defenses... We would never have had a chance. Hallie... she was a big part of that technology. She's a big part of why we're still here." The technology in question sits, glowing primly in the Lair's well appointed drawing room, somehow managing to make a skin-tight, grid-lined body suit seem like conservative attire. Hallie is obviously cut from the same cloth as Ms. St. Claire, as she exudes wary professionalism when faced with the threat of the 4th estate. She likewise is reticent to talk about herself. I ask her about the Beijing campaign instead. The young woman's holographic features grow grim. "The Parody Master's top war-chief, the Avatar, was able to breach our dimensional defenses and set up a beachhead in China. What had started as an already major incursion with 100,000 troops quickly swelled to an occupying force of more than one million before we could mount any kind of retaliation. By that time, they not only had slaughtered countless civilians and converted them into horrid techno-zombies to swell their own ranks, they had gained control of a substantial amount of China's nuclear arsenal. We knew even before we went in that removing them would be costly." Operation Oriental Dark was the most massive undertaking in the war to that point. Launched in November of 2006, it was a multi-pronged counter attack utilizing conventional forces and the Earth's meta-human resources, substantially aided by re-purposed alien technology. Though ultimately a victory, the casualty numbers for the first hours of the attack dwarfed those at the Battle of the Somme. I retrieve an mp3 player from my pocket, set it on the coffee table between us, and play the recording I have downloaded from the Legion's communications archives. Private Thomas Anderson Smith's voice is heard over the crackle of radio static. He is panicking, reporting that he has been shot and that his unit has just been wiped off the map by the advancing Avawarriors. The voice on the other end remains calm and coaxes the necessary information from him. Seated across from me now, the hologram's face goes pale as she listens to her own voice. "That's good... Remember your training, soldier. You're doing fine. You've reported on the enemies activities and the status of your unit. What's next?" "Nnnnn... evaluate... condition." "Right. I'm going to walk you through it, okay? You mentioned blood on your thigh... we need to identify if it's yours. Is there a tear in your uniform, or any other sign of an entry or exit wound?" The recording continues at length. Protocols for communication within a hot combat zone call for radio silence beyond short bursts of information, usually coded, in order to control the intelligence that could be picked up by the enemy. However, within the recording the Lair Legion's Communications Specialist retains an open line for the duration of the field medical evaluation and beyond. I later ask her if this poses a security risk, to Private Smith or to the greater forces in the field. "As always, the rules were written based on what we knew about our last adversaries" she answers. "What we were facing was different. The Avawarriors already knew that they had completely wiped out the 18th Armored Division. They each have a more advanced scanning/surveillance rig built into their armor than anything we have deployed to the field. Beyond that, they're linked at a psionic level, and communications and orders are transferred directly to their brains, uploading the telemetry that any one of them observes to the entire force. They're not the ones in the dark out there" she grimaces. "The Parody Master's forces are only concerned with large troop movements, and coordinating the attack on the next largest force or civilian population. Their commanders feel they are far too formidable to need to worry about any lone survivors of a conflict." I ask her if bridging this communications gap is where she feels she has been able to make the most difference. "I'm not that advanced... I can't link everyone on our side together like that... Not to that degree. But I was designed to handle multiple tasks of information organization all at once, and that gives our side a bit of a leg up. I can cut down on the number of middle men that information has to pass through in order to reach the ears that need to hear it. If need be, I can monitor hundreds of separate channels, and actively participate in scores of them at once." I ask her, of those channels of active participation, how many were spent on wounded soldiers like Private Smith. She fumbles for an answer. "I... Sir Mumphrey has personally authorized me to prioritize my processing resources as I see best" she replies quietly, looking at her hands in her lap. On the recording, Private Smith's breathing has become rapid and shallow. "Your mom worry about you too?" he asks. "I... don't really have a mother." "Were you an orphan or something?" "Something like that, I suppose." "I'm sorry... although, heh, sometimes I think you might have the better deal. My mom is going to be so mad at me when she learns I went and got myself shot. She'll never let me hear the end of it..." On the recording she prods him to talk about his hometown, and his life growing up there. She's a very good listener, knowing just when to ask the next question to set him off on some previously long forgotten memory. In the room, she simply looks down to her lap. I ask her when she knew he wasn't going to make it. "At that point, the lines of the Tianjin front stretched more than 200 miles, and had shifted substantially with the advance of the Avawarrior troops. Private Smith was well behind them. Additionally, his early reports suggested a low percentage of surviving wounded in the area in need of evacuation. Based on the relayed battlefield reports, Battalion Aid had already allotted all available rescue flights to higher density areas. From his reported self examination, he was suffering from shrapnel wounds to the lower abdomen and substantial bleeding due to a possible severed artery in the left leg." She pauses for a long moment. "I knew from the beginning of his report that no-one would be coming for him." On the recording, Private Smith's voice has grown unfocused and weak, taking on a sing-song quality as he fumbles his way through a drinking song he knew from college. The soldier's body would be recovered 3 days later by the Chinese army. "Bloody hell" Sir Mumphrey grumbles, leaning back behind his desk stacked high with charts and reports, a scotch in hand as he takes a rare break to answer my questions. "Did we have any complaints as to the lass's radio policies? I had a slew of generals in here thinking they knew better, aghast at these men broadcasting their last moments on Earth. "Can't have it... bad for morale" they said... Practically ordered me to get her off the air or to get her under control. One even went so far as to suggest reprogramming her. The fact that they're still trying to surgically remove my boot from his ass helped remind them who is calling the shots. And the truth of the matter is, even if they had the power to remove her from the field communications, they simply couldn't afford to do so. It'd be cutting off the nose to spite the face. Even they saw the tactical advantage she offered. I think most were annoyed at anyone showing the kind of initiative she did... especially a 'machine'." "Did they have a point?" he muses, before I can ask the question myself. "There's a fine line to be walked, certainly... Fear is a dangerous thing on a battlefield. It can spread quickly, and hopelessness can seep into the spirit and sap the will to fight, ultimately becoming a self-feeding monster. But I don't think hopelessness is what is being broadcast in those communiques. A general at Battalion Aid may hear the ghosts of the men he's been forced to leave behind, but I believe the men in the field hear something else entirely." He downs his drink and looks to the empty glass. "I don't think they hear someone who has been abandoned at all." Like many government and public medical facilities, Phantomhawk Memorial Hospital has expanded during the course of the war. Through defense funding, it has annexed three of the surrounding buildings, converting them into treatment and rehabilitation facilities for the influx of combat veterens of the ongoing war. Three such soldiers have invited me here today to hear their stories. PFC Geoff Post lost an arm in the trench fighting outside of Tianjin province. Lt. William Anderson was paralyzed from the waist down when his F-22A Raptor was shot down outside of Beijing. Most recently, Sgt. Paul Allenby was trapped under a collapsed building while responding to an incursion of Avatanks in Khartoum. "Of course, nobody knew who she was..." Lt. Anderson is saying. "One of the more common nicknames you'd hear thrown about afterwards was "Beijing Bettie". "Tianjin Tina" was another... obviously the guys who were naming her weren't exactly poets, but by then if you had a radio it didn't matter... you knew who they were talking about anyway." "The mystery obviously fed the legend" PFC Post agreed. "You should'a heard the theories being bandied about. Some people thought she was actually a team of nurses on Ham Radio relays all the way from the states. She had the accent, after all. A few got overly romantic, and said she was an angel or something... I guess they missed all those dirty jokes she used to trade with the guys in the trenches. Probably the most popular one was that she was a SPUD agent who was deployed behind the lines before the counter-invasion. It got more elaborate each time you heard it. "She was captured, and awaiting execution, but had cobbled together a transmitter 'MacGuyver' style"... that kind of thing. Most everyone agreed that she had been disavowed, and that she had no hope of extraction. But she was there for us." Sgt. Allenby nods. "By my time, she had become something of an urban legend for radio operators. She was the ghost of that lost SPUD agent, and she couldn't rest until no one was left behind ever again. Sure, we all laughed at that, and pretended like we didn't believe a word of it... but you always came back to it." "She never let on to anyone who she was" Lt. Anderson explains. "If a guy asked her, she'd simply say she was your biggest fan... and she hung on every word you'd have to say like the best date in the world. At least, that's how it was with me." "I couldn't talk much" Sgt. Allenby counters. "On account of a head wound... I was barely conscious, and she was worried that I'd fall asleep with a concussion. So she talked about herself, and kept prodding me for one-word answers. In hindsight, the things she was talking about were the most common stuff in the world... stuff like memories of her first taste of ice cream, or whatever... and yet she totally made you believe that she was sharing some huge, private secret with you. If most people told me that kind of thing, I'd say they hadn't given me any personal information at all. I'm not so sure she didn't give me more information about herself than my closest friends had ever given about themselves. You couldn't help but fall a little in love with her." "All of the pilots were" Lt. Anderson concurs. "I was lifted to an aid station outside of Tianjin with the 117th division..." PFC Post chimes in. "I had no doubt who had contacted these guys with my position and convinced them to go and get me. She stayed on the line with me through the entire thing, right up until the med evac unit touched down. As they were unloading me from the chopper, I could hear the base commander and the pilot and crew having a huge argument. The guys wanted to go back for her... One guy was sure they could triangulate her position, and bring our missing SPUD agent home. I was weak from loss of blood and hopped up on morphine and God knows what else, but they needed three guys to hold me down and keep me from trying joining them." "No foolin?" Lt. Anderson asks, chuckling. "I would have joined 'em in a heartbeat. Though I don't envy the tongue lashing she must have given them once she got word of what they were trying to do." I ask the men when they learned of her true identity. "Some caught on pretty quickly..." Lt. Anderson explains. "There was that whole thing with those robots up in Canada who were going to open a huge rift for the Parody Master, and she showed up and talked them out of it on live TV. Even with the power blackouts, the media got off on replaying the clip, although they gave it the worst possible spin. Some guys, with just hearing her voice, were able to put two and two together." "A lot of people didn't believe it" Sgt. Allenby counters. "Maybe they didn't want to believe it. Maybe it wasn't particularly any more believable than the SPUD story, or even the ghost one. Most of the guys in the field today just count it as another rumor." PFC Post won't look me in the eye as he answers. "She came here once... it was a few weeks ago. She was relaying something to that pale nurse on the night shift that every GI tries to make time with. She wasn't glowing or green or anything at the time, but I recognized her anyway... I had been reading up on her since coming Stateside again. Anyway, I'm pretending to be asleep so I can try and hear what she's saying without being too obvious-like, when she gets distracted from her conversation... like somebody else is suddenly calling to her... and she tells the nurse she has to go. As she passes my bed she pats me on the foot, gives me a small smile and winks at me. "Get well, Geoffrey" she whispers as she goes." He takes a long drag off of a cigarette. "Only two women in my life have ever called me Geoffrey... and she sure wasn't my mother." I decide it's time to ask about the charges pending against him, as the MP standing guard in the room looks at me and taps his watch to signal I'm almost out of time. PFC Post gives a resigned sigh. "I... you know, it's easy to be a stupid kid when you come from a small town. And when the entire world has to stand up and fight together, well... it's easy to be stupid kids together. My unit... we used to joke about Robo-Americans all the time. How they'd be good for mapping out paths through active mine fields. How their women could be useful if they came with just a "whore" and a "maid" setting, as well as a mute button. We weren't just laughing at them, though... we were pissed at them. The *expletive* robots... they don't bleed. They don't turn to red mist when an Avawarrior shell cuts through them. They don't hurt. They don't fear... and they complain about not being treated equally? Plus, it was going around that they were the cause of all the breaches in the Earth's dimensional barrier... something about their power cores. We were stupid *expletive* kids, and just hearing that was more than enough evidence for us." He nods to the MP standing against the wall. "One of my buddies, a guy from my old unit... he came to visit me last week. Just wanted to cheer me up. Likely felt guilty for the retreat that left me behind. So anyway, he starts telling me this joke that he's told a million times before, about two Arties... you know, Artificials? ...in a brothel... Just some really stupid *expletive* that I would have laughed out loud at before. And I just snap. I don't even know what I'm doing, but I somehow cave in a steel bedpan against this guy's head. Even with one arm, I'm just whaling on the guy... I don't know where that nurse got the strength to pull me off him." He takes a long pull off his cigarette, then finishes: "He had to spend the night in intensive care, but they tell me he's going to be fine... thank God. I still don't know what the *expletive* happened. I don't know what came over me. I just know I'm not that same stupid kid any more." Back in the Lair's Drawing Room, I ask Hallie how much of her processing power goes to monitoring transmissions. "It varies" she tells me. "When there's an active breach, I shunt more of my processors towards communications. At the height of a planned military operation, my full attention, barring any more specific orders, is focused on relaying and decoding reports from the field." I ask her how many conversations, however brief or lengthy, she has had with wounded or dying soldiers over the last year. She closes her eyes, although whether this is to do the calculations or for other reasons is unclear. "16,407" she answers. I am somewhat surprised by how low this number truly is when one takes in the total number of casualties over the course of the war. "Avawarriors are very effective ground troops" she supplies grimly. "And relatively few of our personnel carry radios." Nodding, I ask her how many received help in time. "13,783." She braces herself for the obvious follow-up question, as this figure leaves 2624 souls for whom the last voice they heard belonged to this woman. However, our interview ends here, as at 18:38:23 GMT she receives word from Australia's 14th Light Horse Regiment (Queensland Mounted Infantry) of a defense breach in progress 8 km northwest of Pittsworth. Instantly, the Earth Defense Headquarters on Lair Island is at full alert. Within 8 minutes, Terminus Teams are en route and the LairJet is prepped for take off while the aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious sets a course to Brisbane. Four hours later, I am in the situation room with Sir Mumphrey and senior military staff as reports are coming in showing the breach closed and the Avawarrior troops contained. It is, Earth Defense Force staff insist, business as usual these days. I manage to snag Hallie's attention after she delivers the latest telemetry data to the joint chiefs, and ask her about the status of the 14th Light Horse. Her lips tighten and she swallows before replying. "No further transmissions were received."

This "slow week" has been persisting for quitte a while now, it's kind of depressing.

I'm starting to see why it's tough getting people to come back or stick around - they come back here once a week or so and see one new post, usually from me, usually something they wouldn't read anyhow. Then start to come back even less because there's so much activity on their own Facebook page and that makes the PVB even more depressing. So then it's once every couple weeks, then once a month, and then maybe drop by once or twice a year to see if anything changed.

My Facebook page is empty though - I hate the drama that comes with it, from visitors to potential employers to constant policy changes. I'm guessing a lot of people who used to or would post here are now posting to FB, or a private blog, because of the feeling of satisfaction of controlling the audience and the media, but what they're doing is giving up the cooperative nature of a message board like this for a more competitive atmosphere (read my stuff not someone else's!) and also giving up some rights to control (FB/the blog site often claim some ownership rights).

But then again, I have to consider that maybe I'm wrong and I'm rejecting what's really the future out of personal pride for the software and the place we've created, and if I don't get my act together and set up Facebook or a blog for writing, I'll be writing for an audience of one (me) very soon.

I know the PVB has "recovered" before, but each time that recovery is less. I see more and more people who stop by just to say they won't be posting often because they have FB/blog/personal project to take care of, and those posts have an I'm not coming back finality to them.

Like I said, it's just depressing to see, not because I'm rejecting the natural order of things, but because I don't see anywhere to go for a creative writing outlet after it's gone. I tried the blog/personal site thing before, and I don't like FB because I dislike their policies, and frankly, some of my friends don't get along. It saddens me to feel like soon I'll have to struggle to find motivation to write again because nobody is there to read it.

P.S. Yes I suppose I could focus on publishing professionally, but with the chance of rejection so high that's very little motivation at best. And the fact is, from what I've seen others like Ian publish, I don't feel like I'm really that good.