Appearance: 
  
 
Page:   
 Share It:
https://fiction.homepageofthedead.com/forum.pl?readfiction=1205H

The War Is Over
(© Biswapriya Purkayastha)

Page 3

"I heard the enemy is putting out peace feelers," BP said.

"Are they?" the Director said, and it was impossible from his voice to understand whether it was a question at all.

On the way to his laboratory – now the new department, of which he was the chief – BP met D. She was pushing along some kind of white plastic contraption on wheels, that resembled a vacuum cleaner. "Congratulations," she said.

He frowned. "You’ve heard?"

Her cool, lovely face broke into an ironic smile. "It’s been all over the place since yesterday," she said. "Everyone knows. I take it you’ve just been told – the last to know, huh?"

He made a short, clumsy bow. "As you say, the last to know." D was very beautiful and very remote, and BP always felt clumsy around her. "How’s your research going?"

"Oh, you know, the same as usual." D was a bluecoat, and had ambitions to move up to green. She had the drive, the single-minded determination. As far as BP knew, she had no life outside her work. "It’s nothing as glamorous as yours, of course." With a smile and a twiddle of her fingers in the air, she walked up the passage, leaving BP to his thoughts.



The war was over.

BP heard of it as he was on the way down to his quarters. A small knot of bluecoats and whitecoats were clustered around a little television set in the middle of the corridor. Normally they’d have made way for a greencoat like a school of sardines parting before a shark, but they were so intent on the screen that they didn’t even notice his presence, so he had to stop as well. The air of barely suppressed excitement was so great that he knew what it would be before he even saw the screen.

The war was over. The war, which had been going on so long, was over. They’d won.

BP stared at the announcer, at the scenes of flag-waving crowds, watching his own name scroll past over and over at the bottom of the screen, hardly noticing what it was saying. Finally he felt the respectful tugging at his sleeve.

It was the very pale whitecoat of the other day, and she was much more deferential now. "The Director would like to see you, Doctor."

The Director was smiling so broadly that his plump face seemed to split almost in two. He even got up from behind his desk to greet BP.

"Well, well," he said, "the hero of the hour."

"Hero?" BP frowned. "I don’t understand."

"You don’t?" The Director shook his head genially. "You scientists, you really live in your own world, don’t you? It’s your invention, my dear man...it’s your invention that won the war!"

"My invention?" BP had half-risen from his chair. "But it’s not even perfected, or refined in any way. You know that. You’ve got all my data daily, as you wanted. We can’t target anything smaller than a big city."

"That’s right," the Director said levelly. "And that’s exactly what we did. Targeted the enemy’s cities, all at once."

BP’s mouth opened, closed, and opened again. When he spoke, his voice came as a whisper. "You know what the disruptor does?"

"Of course I do." The Director looked faintly uneasy. "It increases, as you said, molecular energy levels, so that they give off excess energy as heat and..."

"In a closed system," BP snapped. "In a closed system, like a human body. Those people cooked alive inside their skins!"

The Director shrugged. "It won the war, didn’t it?" He turned his computer screen towards BP. It showed the same scenes of massed flag waving celebrations. "See for yourself."

BP barely glanced at the screen. "They were almost finished anyway," he said. "They were suing for peace, have been for months! Why did this have to be used at all?"

"The government made a decision," the Director said. "They decided to get this over once and for all. And do you realise..."

"What?"

[ Continue to page 4 ]

Donate
Help keep this site online by donating and helping to cover its costs.

Information
Genre:Science Fiction
Type:Short story
Rating:7.57 / 10
Rated By:10 users
Comments: 0 users
Total Hits:41755

Follow Us
 Join us on Facebook to be notified of updates
 Follow us on Twitter to be notified of updates

Forum Discussion
 "In A Violent Nature" - trailer... »
 Helldivers 2 (video game) »
 Alien: Romulus (trailer)... »
 Could James Rhodes aka War Machine hav... »
 Could James Remar have portrayed Rhode... »
 Reacher (Amazon series) »
 SRS Cinema (Merged Threads) »
 Rate the last movie you've seen »
 Fallout (Amazon Prime series) - Based ... »
 TWD: "The Ones Who Live" (Rick/Michonn... »
 TWD: Dead City teaser... »
 Had Rhodes and the boys been inside th... »
 Shogun (TV series) »
 MZ's Movie Review Thread »
 Dune: Part 2 (film) »
 For those who have visited the Monroev... »
 Masters of the Air (Apple TV+ series)... »
 the Walking Dead Empires. PC/MAC MMO S... »
 Boy Kills World (film) trailer... »
 Dawn Of The Dead (1978) - On-Set Home ... »