The Brute Heuristics of Bullshit

"This war is bullshit."

Those were the words that saved humanity.

The words were nothing new, of course. They'd been said by nearly every soldier since time began, said in a wide variety of languages and miseries. Sometimes out loud to a buddy, sometimes muttered under the breath, but still a very old sentiment.

The war had started understandably enough, as wars go. No one could really expect First Contact not to be messy, and the Moonchildren were arrogant bastards, refused to be the first to back down when that first pair of ships circled each other out by Alpha Mensae. That's how we saw it back then, anyway. We wouldn't back down either, but hey, we had our reasons, and the situation was complicated, and never mind that we "won" the ensuing conflict by playing dead and then boarding their ship when they got within grapple-distance.

Were they trying to help? Were they hoping to salvage our ship for any tech they could find, just like we ended up doing to theirs? Even they're not quite sure, now that all official stories have been thrown into doubt. What happened, happened. We discovered they had some serious technological edge on us, and threw ourselves into furious reverse-engineering. It was electrifying, terrifying, unifying. Well, sort of on that last one. You know how humans are. Unifying enough to prosecute a nearly-disastrous war, anyway.

They were just "The Aliens" at first, didn't need to be anything more. The ultimate boogeyman, the archetypical Other. I don't quite remember how long it took after we learned the translation for the name they called themselves before we started calling them "Moonkiddies," at least in English. There were other names too. Don't like remembering those, but we should. We should keep close track of our own worse tendencies, I believe that, my life has led me to believe that most heartily.

'Cuz I was there, you know? I was there for almost the whole thing. That's the story I have for you, really. Just my story, but it's all twined up in what happened, and maybe you'll get more out of it than just textbook bullshit. Okay, maybe that's not quite fair, the stuff in the textbooks, it's not really quite "bullshit," but it's not really truth either. Truth has more texture, more immediacy, it drips with movement and messiness and all those committee-formed histories, they're dry and dead and far away from the realities we lived- there where we were, when we were, all of it, you know? Probably you don't, so I'm here to know it for you and maybe pass some of it on.

There was plenty of actual bullshit to be had, though. You mark my word on that, you can take it right to the bank and get yourself a nice return on investment for eternity because that's a sure, sure thing. Plenty of bullshit, and seeing it, smelling it, letting each other know hey, you know about the bullshit, I know you know it, you know I know it, why should we all stand around just watching it fester? That's what mattered, in the end. Like I said, that's what saved the human race.

It didn't start right after a battle, or right before. It started a long way from any fight, out on a station where we spent time between deployments, right in the middle of R&R. After we got all the usual shore-leave shenanigans out of our systems, all there was really left to do was talk, and think, and remember.

"Hell of a thing, taking that colony world," I said, swirling my thumb around the neck of my lovely cold bottle of beer. Really we had just taken a colony, which is to say a quite small city on the surface of a quite large world, but "taking a colony world" sounds better. The planet had some official astronomical designation, but we'd just taken to calling it "Sunrise" because its eighty-hour day had facilitated the very long dawn during which we'd attacked.

Moonkiddies must have had their own name for it, something they whispered to themselves on their big colony ships during days-long jaunts between wormhole loci. I didn't want to know what it was, but maybe I should.

"Hell of a thing," Corporal Antonopoulos said softly. She ran one hand through her shortish red hair and stared off past my shoulder at some ugly utilitarian bit of station architecture. I didn't have to look myself to know it was ugly. Just about every square inch of these staging stations could be counted on for that.

"How many of them did we kill?" Sergeant Singh asked. He was looking down at the flimsy carbon-lattice table. He hadn't taken a sip of his soft drink in at least an hour. Don't know why that stuck out in my mind, but it did.

Antonopoulos tapped her fingers against her jawbone, thinking, pulling information down from the network through the implant behind her right ear. "Well, the casualty reports say the enemy suffered—"

"Fuck the casualty reports," Singh said suddenly, and we all sat up a little straighter.

Sergeant Potdevin, who had been silent up til now, frowned down at his wine glass, swirling the tiny bit of red still left at the bottom. I still remember that look of concentration on his face.

"Singh," I said carefully, "I don't know if that's..."

"No, he's right," Potdevin interrupted. "Fuck the enemy casualty reports. They only count the ones who count the least."

Antonopoulos put both hands into her hair, curled her fingers tight. "Please don't remind me. We came here to forget, I don't want to..."

Singh slammed his palms down on the table, hard enough to make everything sat on it jump, hard enough he would have knocked the whole thing over if I hadn't reached out to steady it. "Fuck forgetting, too. We'll all remember it the rest of our lives, and we fucking well should." His voice was very loud in the cantina, echoing off the alloy walls, washing across a few dozen other little tables like ours.

I looked around. Two members of station security had taken notice and were on their way. I looked at Singh, caught his eye, then nodded toward the approaching military police.

"I see them," he said tersely, then swept his gaze over the table. "Stand up." He said it in the damned command every non-commissioned officer learned early on in their career, and we all instinctively did it, not just because of the conditioning every soldier has to react to that voice, but because there was something else added in.

The station cops arrived at our table, hands on their belts. Not on their weapons, not quite yet, but that was clearly being put out there as a possibility. "Sergeant," said the senior of the pair, glancing at her partner before giving Singh a level stare, "you need to calm down."

"Sergeant," Singh said back, "I don't think that will help. I'll still remember."

"Sure," she said with a pasted-on professional smile. "But it would behoove you to—"

"I saw you there," he said sharply. "In the nursery, the children's creche, whatever you want to call it. Saw you crouched down among the bodies, crying, when you were supposed to be pulling security."

She lunged forward and slapped him hard across the face.

Silence.

Singh didn't move, didn't reach up to his reddened cheek. The MP sergeant's partner had his hand on her shoulder, pulling her back, face gone even paler than its usual Scandinavian pallor. Her own face was deeply flushed under the near-black of her complexion, and I was close enough to see that she was shaking.

"Good," Singh said. His voice was gentle, soft even, but not quiet. It carried, threading through the whole of the cantina's sudden hush. "Good, you do remember."

Her hand was flexing, open, closed, open, closed, grasping at the air beside her baton. I wondered if I should reach out and try to stop her before she pulled it off her belt, but I didn't. Delicate moments. Never quite sure what to do. Looking back I wonder about that, would could have gone wrong, maybe even gone right from certain points of view, just one tiny word, one single movement.

"I cried too," Singh said simply. "There's no shame in it. Shouldn't be. After everything that went down, everything we did, were ordered to do, everything we weren't ordered to do but knew we were supposed to do anyway, it—"

"They hit our colonies first!" someone yelled from one of the other tables. "We can't just let them do that, they'll—"

Antonopoulos whirled to face the voice. "They'll do the same to us? And then we'll do the same to them? And then what? Earth? Their precious two-moon homeworld? Fuck it! Fuck it fuck it fuck it! This war is bullshit! We're not winning, they're not winning, we're all just losing, all the time, dead kids dead babies ruined colonies ruined dreams and when the fuck will it end, after we've ruined each other's everything? Fucking when?"

No one had any words to argue, not right then. But I looked over at Potdevin. He was concentrating on something, and then I spotted the little dark-grey glints round his face, hanging in the air. Perspective cameras. He was recording this. For some future court-martial, some official inquest? No. Not Potdevin. I knew him too well for that.

The MPs hand had fallen away from her baton, and her partner was leading her away. Not sure where to. His light blue eyes met mine for a moment, though, and we spoke, no words, just understanding. They wouldn't be a problem. They were stepping aside from this.

Someone finally broke the silence, voice coming loud from the table right behind me. "We all know this war is bullshit, it's fuckin' obvious to anyone with eyes and half a brain."

"Goddamn brute fact," someone else yelled. "Nothing anyone can do about it."

"No," Singh said, "that's bullshit too, that there's nothing anyone can do. We can do plenty. We're humanity. Us, the rank and file out here. Us, the masses back on Earth and in every colony. Not the generals. Not the politicians. Not half the officers with their fucking career goals and casualty reports. Us. We're humanity, and we can do plenty. This war is over. Let's call it now. It's over."

"Fuck you," someone else called from my left. "The Moonkiddies won't stop just because we do."

"How the Hell could we know that?" Singh said. "We've never stopped. I don't know what they'll do and neither do you. But we all know how it will end, if it keeps on going. You think there's gonna be a sudden break in the war? Some super-weapon, some heroic fight on some colony world that turns the whole tide? You willing to risk the lives of everyone you've ever known on that stupid hope?"

Silence again.

"I'm not saying we just lay down arms and let them roll over us. We can tell them the war is over. Give them back some of the worlds we've taken, I don't know."

"That's humiliating, that's almost a surrender," someone grumbled to my right.

Antonopoulos laughed, low and bitter. "Who fucking cares? We just gonna proudly mule our way into extinction? They've been too stubborn and proud to call it quits either, so hey, let's prove ourselves the better species. Let's be the ones to end this."

"The people back home won't stand for it," I said, almost surprised at the sound of my own voice. Resigned, sad. Maybe a little despairing. "Casualties are still low on both sides, compared to homeworld populations. They can't see where this is going. They just don't know the realities out here, and by the time reality comes home to Earth it'll probably be too late."

"They will see," Potdevin said, and Singh nodded at him.

"What?" I said. "When? They only get the official bullshit rep—"

"Not anymore," Singh said. "Sergeant Potdevin and I found a workaround, a way to piggyback on that official bullshit you're talking about. Some of it's probably hitting Earth right now, and..."

"...and I already sent out my recording of this, right after Antonopoulos finished talking," Potdevin said. "Right after the "let's be the ones to end this,' great line really."

"You planned all this?" I said, still trying to process everything going on, everything that already had.

Singh shook his head. "No. It was just time. We've all been thinking it, we've all talked about it. It's just time. We all know this is bullshit. Now let's end it."

I'm not going to pretend that was the end. It got plenty messy after that. Station riots. Court martials. Emergency elections back home. Amateur backchannel communications to the Moonkiddies. More attacks on both sides. Pointless deaths. It wasn't the end, but it was the end's beginning, because we all knew, and once we'd said it out loud there was really no going back.

Bullshit is bullshit, and probably there are more important things than the ability to recognize it, see it and tell it for what it is, but looking back? I can't think of any right now.