Flashbacks

"One of the funny things when the Feds joined in was that some of them weren't quite tracking how batshit insane the war had gotten. Like, yeah, they knew about all this shit, living jets, amalgam shifters, you name it, but a bunch of em didn't quite make the connection that it was all actually happening. In their minds, it was just sorta something that existed, but it existed over there and it wasn't something they'd actually see."

"Did that ever cause any problems?"

"Kinda, kinda not. They usually deferred to anyone with actual combat experience, and when we got sent over to augment them, we'd seen all the shit there was to see. And, well, I had my name to back me up."

Downtown Madras, Tamil Nadu, Republic of India.
October 23rd, 1766.
Two weeks after Operation Grindstone.

"Cap, leave it for us. You don't want to do block-to-block fighting, not with mixed troops. Just light up the building, we'll handle the assaults."

"Excuse m—", he started, looking offended that a foreign NCO was telling him what to do.

Vaya resisted the urge to roll her eyes. "Sir, you see my name tape? See this patch? We're better at this than you are. Let us do our jobs."

He read the name printed on her uniform, as if he expected to not recognize it, and his eyes widened when he did.

"You're..."

"Yeah. That one."

"You were already pretty well-known then, right?"

"Yeah, I didn't try and fight the folks who wanted interviews. Did six or seven long ones when we were back at Fort Bloodland between Central America and Downriver. The ritual mods for amalgamation had just gotten distributed, so I figured being the first one would blow over pretty fast once other folks started opting in. That, uh, wasn't exactly true, obviously."

"You are kind of a big deal."

"I mean, now, sure. But that was back before Hotsprings, they hadn't even bumped me up to sergeant yet. Hel, I hadn't even seen real combat as an amalgam yet."

"So, what happened at Hotsprings?"

"C'mon, they made a movie about it. Solid watch, very accurate, I'd recommend it. Might have helped a bit too."

"Wait, you consulted on Winter Springs? I didn't know."

"Yup! Me and Citra Kishori, actually. We didn't want it public before it came out, it felt a little tacky. And we sure as fuck didn't need more awards. But I figured it was gonna focus too much on me and not all the other folks if nobody was there to stop 'em, so. Yeah."

"Everything you say drives me down another little tangent."

"I'm good at that! I don't give interviews a lot these days, and I have a lot of stories."

"Is it alright if we get into that, then?"

"Sure, go ahead."

"Okay, so... what was that like? Well, maybe we should talk about what happened at Hotsprings first."

"Yeah. I'm sure anyone can go read a wiki article on it, but the short explanation is, two NUA brigades get sent to clear out the sleepy little town of Hotsprings, about twenty klicks east of Downriver. Odie's got three brigades there. The whole front's fighting, so they probably won't get reinforcements unless we get a breakthrough, but then we'll get help too, you know the drill. Push where they're weakest and all that."

"Right."

"So we skirmish around Hotsprings for a day or so, trying to figure out where they're weak, and the big brains at NID figure out that the Odie commander isn't moving his armor around. No fuel, no spare parts, who knows. But if those tanks had crews, they were frozen stiff by then."

"Except they weren't, right?"

"Right. Normally Odie commanders weren't the brightest bunch. I think at that point in the war they had started picking political loyalty over smarts, but not that one. That bastard read us like a fucking book. He kept his tanks and IFV's off so long that they froze practically solid, looked totally dead on orbital IR. He'd been having his troops move them into camouflaged emplacements by hand, at night. I'd have to give him credit if he wasn't a fascist. Anyway, we do our big push and the assholes who have been slowly dying from frostbite turn their tanks on, and suddenly there's thirty fuckin Vijetas in defilade and we're down the better part of two dozen tanks."

"That's pretty bad, right? I mean, I saw the movie—"

"Yeah, the movie gets it right. It was real fucking bad. One of the few things that used to scare us was rolling steel. The essies built their gunsights to track dragons, they'd nail you with fullbore canister from a thousand meters, ruin your bodies when you tried to run and let infantry pick you off with autocannons and grenades once you weren't on four legs. Canister wouldn't get through your skull plating, but the idea was that it would deprive a lot of targets of spares real fast. Which normally worked pretty well, from what I understand."

"I suppose that doesn't work too well on amalgams."

"Yup. We sure scared the shit outta Odie, that's for sure. So, for the folks at home, amalgams can pick and choose what pieces of their body they put together. And when we get wounded, we don't have to fix everything when we shift new parts in. When they opened up on us with canister, we only fixed what we needed to protect our heads and stay standing. We must have taken sixty rounds of canister between the eight of us by the time we got out of the killzone, and that's sixty rounds that didn't mulch everyone else."

"Doesn't that hurt?"

Hotsprings, Kulshan, Northern Union.
November 4th, 1765.
Fourteen months and fifteen days after the Seattle landings.

The canister shot scythed through her ruined scales, eviscerating flesh and shattering bone. But the parts that could actually kill her— only one pellet pinged off of her skull plates. She was still alive. Pain blossomed throughout her, but pain was her body telling her that something was wrong, and she knew more about her body than her lying biology did. Bones and muscles knit back together using only the barest fraction of spare biomass, and she stood up again. Her ceramic scales broke differently every time, and she only had to fix the cracks.

Again, motherfuckers. Do it again. Shoot me. Don't pay attention to everyone else.

And they did. Over, and over, and over. She stood back up each time. They were machine-gunning her, and she was weaving towards them, and they just couldn't seem to land enough headshots to break her skull. They didn't train for those, not at this range. They aimed for center of mass and let weight of fire bring the target down, and that was perfectly fine with her.

And eventually, the compressed-air pssshhht of friendly ATGM launches replied to the tanks' cannons, and Vaya sunk down into the snow in a much smaller body to rest, just for a minute.

"Oh, it hurt like you wouldn't believe, even with the pain dampening. But surviving getting shot by a tank? It's intoxicating. You can feel it shredding you and bouncing off your face scales, and you just know in your heart that if you're still here to notice it, it can't hurt you. You feel invincible. The movie puts a bit of a spin on it, makes that the climax of the fight, us amalgams realizing what we can do."

"Was that not what happened in reality?"

"Oh, all the fighting played out almost exactly like it happened on the screen, but Hotsprings was a tough fight even after that. We didn't make a breakthrough there, that came at Rockport. I meant more we'd figured out what we could do back at Bloodland before we shipped out. The story's a lot more compelling if you think we only stopped being scared at the climax, but nah, we were shooting ourselves just to see how many bullets we could take for a solid week before we saw combat. I literally played hopscotch with mines. We were more scared that we'd take an unlucky shot in the eyeball than we were about the bodily trauma."

Fort Bloodland, Missouria, Northern Union.
October 28th, 1765.
Twenty-three days after the discovery of amalgamation.

"Hey, sarnt, can I get some land mines? Live ones, not the rubber dummies we had in training."

"Uh. What for?"

She flickered scales over skin, as if the answer was obvious. "Testing."

Sergeant Kamau looked at her like she was stupid, "Absolutely not? No, you can't go step on a landmine for fun! It'll put shrapnel up through the bottom of your jaw."

"Oh, uh. We figured out how to block that. You can sort of reposition jaw scales into all the places where shrapnel might go. The limits on location are... flexible, we think. Kinda blocks your windpipe and jugular and stuff, but that doesn't really matter for us. You know."

She raised an eyebrow. "Soldier, you scare the shit out of me every time we talk."

"Wow. I didn't really expect 'I liked getting shot' for an answer."

"It's... okay, you like being transhuman, yeah? Live longer, see in the dark, don't need oven mitts, fly where you need to go, that sort of thing, right?"

"Sure, yeah."

"You like your body, right? I assume you picked it?"

"I... I mean, it's pretty close to what I was born with, but yes, I picked the improvements. And my scales."

"Okay. Would you say you love being transhuman?"

"...hmm. Not really, I think? I enjoy it, but it's more useful than it's like... a core part of my being, you know? I definitely know people who do love it, though."

"Yeah. Amalgams are like that, but we love shapeshifting itself. Well, real-deal ones do. Anyone can be one, but you don't stick with it unless you love it, I'm told the constant shifting starts to get overstimulating. But yeah. Getting shot, blown up, all that, and just shrugging it off? It's proof that your flesh is clay and you're the sculptor. It might hurt, but it feels good emotionally. if that makes any sense?"

Hyderabad, Telangana, Republic of India.
February 10th, 1768.
Six months before the end of combat operations.

"Put the gun down, dad. It won't do anything."

"You're— you're—"

"Yeah. Look," she drew her pistol, put it to the side of her head, and pulled the trigger. The handgun round flattened itself against forty millimeters of bioceramic as her father looked on in horror, and she holstered the gun once more. "You need something a lot bigger than that thing to scare me these days."

And then she realized that his ears probably couldn't hear anything after a gunshot at this range, and that she had instinctively swapped hers out for fresh ones the moment the gun had gone off.

She resisted the urge to smile in spite of it all. Gods, I love this.

"I think so! It's affirming, right?"

"Exactly, yeah."

"Let's go back to Hotsprings, how did you become such a big name?"

"Well, most of it got caught on a Wasps's AR cameras. And yeah, I did actually yell that stuff about buying time. So it was a propaganda bit almost instantly, and Hotsprings stuck around in people's minds as the first time amalgams saw combat. But it really wasn't that important of a battle, that whole northern push got bogged down until we had folks move up north around Seattle and caught ODI in the middle."

"I don't think that mattered too much, though."

"It definitely didn't. First amalgam, now some sort of war hero? People ate it up. And after that they put me up as first sergeant for my own company of amalgams, and, well."

"And then the rest of the war happened, right. So, now that we have the context, how was working on Winter Spring? How did you even get into it?"

"Oh, the director, Arthur Gray, was wonderful. He called me up some afternoon and said 'hey, this is Art Gray, I want to make a movie about you', and then I kind of fangirled a bit because I had just seen The Russian, which was absolutely fantastic. And he wanted me to advise! I was honestly floored."

"Were they like, totally clueless without your help, or did they have a decent idea?"

"Oh, Art had a decent idea, and so many folks fought in the war that it's not hard to recreate scenes from it. But he wanted to do Hotsprings, exactly. So we went out there, flew over all the terrain, showed him how long it took to get from place to place, all that. The movie's not right down to the second, but the perception of time in it is really good. Kind of why I got so excited to work on it, The Russian is the same way, the suspense is insane."

"So just the ground view, sort of?"

"That and the fighting. Art wanted realistic, so we showed him. Those scenes where everyone else is freaked the fuck out by the amalgams? Some of those are real reactions from the cast."

"Wait, what do you mean by real? Like—"

"Like he got a machine gun and lit me the fuck up on set in front of everyone, yeah. With my encouragement. Most of the actual scenes of us getting shot, or the actors playing us, I guess, those are partial CGI so they could tweak all the little details, but everyone got a dose of real gore. And Art filmed it because he's crazy like that, and a couple of those reactions got into the final film."

"So folks really were that freaked out by amalgams, then."

"Kind of, yeah. Back then, everyone thought the constant shifting was the coolest, but that's not why we were useful, we were useful because we can't fuckin' die. Or at least, not like normal shifters can. Number one source of infantry-on-infantry kills was explosive autocannon shells going off close enough to your head to put shrapnel into your brain, around your helmet or scales or whatever. We can put some scales inside our necks and around our skulls for armor. The biology doesn't work, it's unpleasant as hell, and it looks like shit, but it kept us alive. Anyway. Uh, when they saw us do the whole not fuckin' dying bit, that's what freaked folks out."

"Huh. Wasn't that like, the whole deal with transhumans in the war? Get shot, shift, keep going?"

"Yeah, but not like that. You still feel it, your mind still responds like you actually got shot, because you did. You hit the deck, you panic, but you survive. Amalgams don't have that response, or at least we can suppress it by choice. So they saw me just walking through a stream of tracers like I didn't care that I was getting shredded. Very messy."

April 4th, 1789.
Studio 3, Ironwood Studios, Seattle, Inyo, Northern Union.
One year before the release of Winter Spring.

"Art, are you sure you wanna do this? You're gonna traumatize someone."

"You'll be fine, right? And these are all folks who have seen some real visceral effects before, they'll be alright."

"Oh, I'll have a wonderful time. But there's a difference between seeing an effect and watching... you know what, fuck it. I haven't been shot for a while. Go for it."

Art called the cast together while Vaya cracked her neck and ran her hands through her hair.

"Vaya, we're ready for you!" She strolled out onto the set, a smile sneaking onto her face. She liked this.

"Light me up."

Art held down the trigger, and the machine gun tore into her chest. The first shots deflected off of armored scales, and she slowly rotated around, as if the hail of bullets was just rain. It took a moment to wrestle control over her instinctive self-armoring, but she managed to get the scales away and let the shots punch through her instead.

Vaya gave a thumbs up as the crew looked on in horror, and she just grinned in reply.

"I can imagine. How did you get on with your body double? Was it weird to have someone playing a past you?"

"Mana Sankhalan? She was lovely. There's... I don't know, a sort of camaraderie with other amalgams. I think our reactions to letting someone else be us might be different than other folks. I'm not very protective of my face, I've certainly changed it as I've felt like it. And Mana's always done a good job at wearing other people's faces. Did you see The Copenhagen Problem? She was the villain in that, wonderful casting."

"You watch a lot of movies, I take it?"

"Always have! Can't say I'm any good at making them, but I enjoy playing the critic, and it helps that I have a lot more free time these days."

"That raises a good question, what was it like for you when the war ended?"

"It was a relief. No more dead friends, no more suffering under essentialism. I think that's an answer that a lot of people don't really want to hear."

"How so? It's not an exciting one, but I'm not sure what you mean."

"Hm. Kind of a complicated explanation, I guess. Any trained and equipped amalgam is a living weapon, right, the same way a Blacklight is. I mean, so is a soldier, to some degree, but amalgams and engineered dragons and vehicle complexes are so much more so. People have expectations about how living weapons should behave. We should like war a little too much, have trouble integrating back into society, be aimless without orders, that sort of thing. They get a little disappointed when we do normal stuff."

"That's... you know, that's really true, I think. Was that something you felt Winter Spring covered?"

"A bit! That came out of my first chat with Art. Some of my favorite parts of the movie are those parts with people just chatting. Very humanizing, and they made Mana a lot funnier than I ever was."

"Humanizing's an interesting choice of words."

"Oh, don't get on me going about that, we'll be here all day."

"I'm not exactly pressed for time, if you want to."

"Well, it all started when some asshole figured out what agriculture was..."