Espie Droger dreams of war. What else can he dream of? There is nothing left. He has dreamed of world travel and expensive Scotch and lithe young women and sudden uncontrollable laughter. But his vitality has seeped from him like fluid from a dying tree. Espie is old. And Espie is tired. He used to dream of building a cabin in the woods and a family with offspring and expert systems to run the world. Now he dreams of rubbled cities and bursting orange flames and heaps of charred bones and the screams of babies. Now Espie dreams of war.

He walks the shore of his private Maine island and remembers the day he settled here, nearly four decades ago, when the ocean lapped the rocks a hundred trees downslope. But since then, the Earth warmed, the ice caps melted, and the waters slowly rose, and now even during the coldest months it hardly ever snows. More than anything, Espie misses the sound of boots on fresh powder, the morning stillness in the forest after an overnight snow, and the numinous sparkle of a trillion white crystals in the dawn. He walks the shores and dreams of those ancient days, when life was new and exciting and he did not dread all his tomorrows. Now there is only an endless stream of gray sunsets broken by the weekly arrival of the mailboat and its ferryman carrying news from shore.

“Kakiye novosti?” Espie asks. What’s new?

And the ferryman replies, “Nothing much. Nothing much at all.”

• • • •

Espie sits at his desk, staring at his locked computer screen, and the vision of that gray beach fades like the afterimage from a lightning flash, asymptotically attenuated forever. This is the third time this month that Espie woke in that different time and place, inhabiting a future not yet been. It felt real, being that bitter old man lost in nostalgia and regret. But present-day Espie isn’t haunted by guilt like that pathetic creature. Espie is young and eager and alive, and that dissipated future man is merely a nightmare brought on by too much hard work and too little sleep.

Two scant hours ago Espie arrived at the Procurement and Logistics building and said hi to his dark-suited colleagues in the break room that always smells of old coffee and rotten fruit, and he and his colleagues shared perfunctory tales of their weekend adventures, and Espie lied and said he had gone out and had a good time with friends, though he’d sat home all weekend ordering takeout and playing video games on the couch. And after their tales, Espie filled his giant coffee mug to the brim and headed down two flights of stairs to his subbasement office, patting himself on the back for not spilling a drop of liquid along the way.

Espie’s desk sits in a corner of a crowded storeroom that reeks of must and old paper, surrounded on three sides by cardboard boxes stacked on metal shelves to the ceiling. Espie’s been working down here for nine months, and though he’s thought about peeking inside the moldering boxes, he never once dared to look, too afraid of getting caught and punished and maybe even, the way things have been going lately, executed for treason.

It’s cold down here in the subbasement, and dark, except for the single fluorescent tube above his desk that gives everything a pallid, otherworldly glow. But Espie likes sitting here alone, with nothing but the thrum of the boiler down the hall and the moldering cardboard boxes to keep him company. Here he can focus on work.

Espie’s laptop is bolted to his desk and he logs in with a long and complicated password he’s proud of having memorized, and numbers light up his screen, spreadsheets and graphs, tabulations and data, dynamically updated from all over the country and world, a mess of data that only Espie can untangle. Sitting here, Espie will remake the world.

He sips his coffee and leans forward and nods and gets back to work.

• • • •

Thirty-six years later, in his Maine cabin, Espie tosses and turns in bed, unable to sleep. This has been happening much lately, this pestering insomnia, when the memories of long ago tear at his conscience like glass shards and leave his soul bare and bleeding. Something has to change, and he knows just what this is, and one day, maybe today, maybe even this morning, he’ll take that final leap, because this can’t go on forever.

Moonlight illuminates the fog outside his window, just like the pallid light that lit his basement desk all those eons ago. God, he used to love those days, the comfort of numbers, the feeling of accomplishment, the joy at the end of a day’s work. He slept easy then, knowing he was helping the national cause. Now there is nothing but the howl of wind, promising but never delivering snow, and endless dreams of innocent blood.

Espie hears movement in his bedroom and he fumbles for the nightstand light and in its yellow glow there is a figure at the foot of his bed and Espie shrieks.

The figure wears a well-decorated military uniform, but Espie isn’t sure which branch or rank because he never bothered to learn, despite taking orders from uniformed men like this for years. But as Espie dons his glasses he sees they are not a man, but a woman, and a brown one too, which is not unheard of, especially among the lower ranks. But a brown woman with this many medals and stars? So few survived the purges, and Espie could count on one hand those that did, and he knew well their faces and names, because they were paraded around the country like trophies and proudly displayed in the new history books for all to mark and remember. But this brown woman in her well-decorated military uniform standing at the foot of his bed is not one of those few.

“Espie Droger, Fed ID 478-984-7132,” the woman says in an accent he can’t place. She speaks flatly, like she’s addressing a wall.

“Yes,” Espie says. “Who are you? What’s going on? How’d you get inside?”

“Mr. Droger, I am Lieutenant Major Ursula Ghauri, and I’ve been sent here to stop a travesty.”

“Excuse me?”

“Less than four hours from now, on this morning of March 7th, 2074, at approximately 0645 hours local time you will stand on the rocks on the southwest promontory of this island and take your own life by shooting yourself in the mouth with a hunting rifle. Your body won’t be found for nine days, until the mailboat pilot that visits this island weekly investigates your absence. By then your bloated corpse will be infested with sea lice and flies, and the crabs and sea birds will have pecked your flesh to the bone.”

Espie is shaking and feels like vomiting and he wants to reach for a knife or gun he doesn’t have nearby. “I don’t understand. Are you threatening me?”

“No, Mr. Droger. A threat implies a potential for escape. You have no such luxury.”

“I don’t understand.”

“That’s my purpose, Mr. Droger, to help you understand. By the Temporal Council of War and the New Terran Governing Corpus you have been found guilty of crimes against humanity. A version of yourself from a timeline closed off to you has testified on your behalf in front of judge and jury. The verdict was unanimous on all counts. Guilty. The punishment for your crimes is spotchkai.”

“Spot-what?”

“Spotchkai. It’s a word that doesn’t yet exist in your language. Its meaning roughly translates to ‘life attenuation by gradual reality diminishment.’”

“Is this a joke?”

“I’m afraid not, Mr. Droger.”

“Who did you say you were?”

“Lieutenant Major Ursula Ghauri, here on behalf of the Temporal Council of War and the New Terran Governing Corpus. I’m to execute your sentence.”

“Are you’re saying you’re from the future?”

“Not the future, Mr. Droger. One potential timeline from your future. This timeline we presently inhabit is about to be closed off from the world. It may be more correct to say that both of us now exist in a closed time-like loop being excised from reality, like slicing off an infected boil. In this case, I, the lance, will be thrown away with the infection, to make sure the cut is clean.”

• • • •

Espie blinks alert at his basement desk, and the dream-vision recedes like tides from an empty beach. His heart thrums and his breath catches, and the dream-vision persists in his thoughts throughout the day.

Espie tells himself it’s lack of sunlight or too much caffeine or the melatonin he’s been taking to sleep. He is supposed to optimize processes and streamline logistics, but all day he just moves the numbers around perfunctorily. The intention is there but the feeling is gone. Espie usually exults in the work, delights in the mathematics, but there is no joy today, and he works late to make up for lost time.

It’s well after 2100 hours and most have gone home when he hears footfalls on the stairs, and a uniformed officer steps down, and Espie sees their shiny shoes first, then their ironed pants, and the olive green of their shirt, and for a terrifying instant he thinks this person is Lieutenant Major Ghauri from his dream-vision. But then he sees the liver-spotted white fist and the broad masculine shoulders and he breathes a sigh of relief. This is General McHolland, whom he knows well.

“Sir, I—” Espie says, jumping to his feet.

“Sit, son,” the General says, and Espie obeys. “Working late again, eh?”

“Sorry, sir, I just wanted to—”

“Don’t apologize for hard work, son. Betty in Allocation tells me you’re our most efficient data engineer. You’re our unsung hero. We need to get you a better office with natural light and a window. It’s a goddamn cave down here.”

“I like it down here, sir. It’s quiet and I can get work done.”

“I bet you can, Espie. I bet you can. You may not know it, son, but your work is helping us win the war.” Espie tenses some at the word “war,” because there haven’t been any big battles, only endless decrees and orders and movements of people and materiel like pieces on a chess board. Though, now that Espie thinks of it, there have been deaths. Lots of them, though their numbers lay buried in charts and graphs in rounding errors and fractional remainders. And late at night, when the magnitude of his work often rouses him from sleep, he consoles himself that it’s a necessary evil. There are enemies among us, after all, and like vermin and inefficiency they need to be rooted out. “Without men like you, son,” the General goes on, “hardworking, strong young men who do the necessary labor without whining like pussies, well, the war’d be lost. I’m putting you in for a commendation.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“You hungry, son? You want me to get one of the girls to order you dinner?”

“No, sir. Thank you. Sir.”

“Well, you just holler if you need anything. New desk. New office. Tomorrow I’ll talk to the boys upstairs about getting you a raise. You deserve it, son. And, Espie?”

“Yes, sir?”

And suddenly General McHolland’s face isn’t his anymore, but Lieutenant Major Ghauri’s, brown and female, and she has all the wrath of a vengeful demon. “Keep up the good work, son,” Lieutenant Major Ghauri says, and Espie gasps.

“Everything all right, son?” the General says, and Espie blinks, and the General’s a man again, white face, square jaw, a day of scruff. “Yes, sir, all good, sir,” Espie stutters, and the General gives Espie a curious look and nods and seems both puzzled and amused as he heads back upstairs to his war.

• • • •

It’s still dark on the island, and moonlight spills down through the fog like corpse light, but a hint of the coming dawn limns the east, and the fog in that direction glows like orange fire. Espie and Lieutenant Major Ghauri walk the shore as a biting wind nips at his exposed skin. Espie shudders, but the Lieutenant Major doesn’t seem to be affected by the cold.

She walks with her hands behind her back. “I’ll try to put this as succinctly as I can, Mr. Droger. Six months from now, there will be a world war that leads to a global nuclear exchange. The details of this war are too complex to get into, but the government you served for years, the government who gave you this island and built you your house and gave you your generous pension—this government is the war’s chief instigator. Your country will suffer enormous casualties and in the aftermath your government and dozens of others will collapse. And after a tumultuous decade, a new world government will arise, and that government will seek to make expiations for the sins of the past that led to the global catastrophe. And when tabulating the number of deaths caused by individuals, based on recovered data, your actions will be ranked number six, you being responsible, directly or indirectly, for more than eleven million deaths, not including the 400 million dead from the nuclear exchange.”

“This is a dream. I’m dreaming.”

“No, this is spotchkai. Your consciousness is being attenuated.”

They reach the rocky promontory on the southwest corner of the island just as the orange sun crests the horizon, and its meager warmth begins to burn away the fog. Waves crash loud and the sea wind bites, and there are birds on the rocks, and crabs too, and there’s a dead seal washed up, all bloated, its ribs exposed to the sky. Except it’s not a seal.

“That’s you, Mr. Droger, a week after you shot yourself. However, that travesty won’t happen now. A jury of your peers has unanimously decided that letting you take your own life on this beach is too lenient a sentence for your crimes.”

“I’ve lost my mind.”

“That defense didn’t work for the jury and it doesn’t work now. You received quarterly psych evaluations as part of your government employment. And though the intentions of those evaluations are suspect, the data they provide is clear. You were of sound mind and body when you sent eleven million people to their deaths.”

“I didn’t kill anyone. I was a data engineer. I optimized processes. I streamlined production logistics.”

“And you had no idea what those numbers represented, right, Mr. Droger?”

Espie blinks stupidly at her. “No.”

“The jury found that hard to believe, Mr. Droger. And frankly, Mr. Droger, so do I. My grandparents were among the people you sent to their deaths.”

“I didn’t send anyone to their deaths!”

“My grandmother was arrested for spreading anti-government messages on the internet. She was denied her medication in prison and died of kidney failure. Your name was on the order that cut healthcare to inmates. The footnote, signed by you, recorded it a cost-saving measure. My grandfather was arrested for holding so-called subversive meetings at his bookstore and was forcefully relocated to an internment camp. The camp didn’t have clean drinking water, and he and hundreds of others died there of disease. Your orders cut the water filtration from the camp. There are eleven million more examples, Mr. Droger. Should I go on?”

“This is a nightmare. I have to wake up!”

“I’m sure the eleven million people you murdered felt the same way when they were dying.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“I was born in a displaced persons’ camp, Mr. Droger. My mother died from brain cancer, my father from lung cancer. Everyone gets cancer in my time, Mr. Droger. It’s like the common cold. I grew up in the hell you helped bring about. That’s why I volunteered for this suicide mission, so that I can be sure your sentence is executed successfully. I volunteered to undergo spotchkai. This version of me will attenuate with you. I am, for all intents and purposes, dead, Mr. Droger, and therefore I am out of fucks to give.”

“Wake up, wake up, wake up . . .”

“I’m sure that’s what Kayla Johnson wished for too. She was twenty-seven, an oncology nurse, arrested for medically treating an undocumented immigrant. She died in prison from starvation after your order rescinded food deliveries to save money.”

“Please stop.”

“Chaya Stutskever. Fifteen. She had severe disabilities and needed twenty-four hour medical care. But your cost saving measures cut public funding to schools. She suffocated on her own mucus because the public school she attended could no longer afford to hire a nurse.”

“But I didn’t—”

“Kill them? Not all murders happen at the end of a gun, Mr. Droger.”

On the rocky promontory, a cormorant pecks at the corpse’s skull.

• • • •

It’s 1930 after a long workday and Espie and his colleagues sit in a circular booth at an expensive lounge with plush velvet seats and candle lighting and slow jazz playing from hidden speakers, and the men smoke cigars and drink Scotch and the women sip martinis, and everyone is laughing and smiling and having a grand time, and Espie realizes they’re waiting for him to answer some question he didn’t hear them ask, because part of him still walks that desolate beach beside Lieutenant Major Ghauri.

“W-w-what?” Espie stutters, and his colleagues laugh, especially Bethany, with her perfect white teeth and flawless skin, whom Espie’s had a crush on since forever, and his face becomes a furnace and he leans forward to sip his expensive Scotch to hide his shame. And under the clear table is a wide glass cylinder, like a huge jar of preserves, holding up the table, and Espie was sure, when he first sat down, the cylinder had been full of glass marbles and flowers and abstract artistic shapes, but now the cylinder is full of shrunken corpses of children, and their eyes are swollen like hard-boiled eggs squeezed from their shells. And Espie screams and jumps up and his colleagues gawp at him with alarm and say, “What’s wrong, Espie? What happened?”

And Espie says, “Excuse me, I have to go, I’m not feeling well.” And when he looks around the expensive lounge, all the tables have babies in them, like fetal specimens in his high school biology class. And not just the tables, but the circular booths are skinned with the leather of dead people, and there are lines of human teeth adorning the railings, and the chair legs are human femurs, and their cocktail glasses are filled with human blood. And his colleagues are still smiling and laughing and having a grand time as Espie runs out into the rain.

Espie was sure there was a parking lot here before, and a highway, and neon signs and a fast food joint across the road, but now there is only an ashen gray landscape and smoke as far as he can see.

“We have your credit card receipts,” Lieutenant Major Ghauri says, standing beside him. “You went out with your colleagues six hundred and eighty one times during your stint working for the government. You always put it on the government’s tab. You didn’t even pay for your own drinks.”

“What is this? Where am I? “

“This is where the parking lot was, outside the lounge. This is what you did to the world.”

The gray is everywhere, in everything. “But I didn’t—”

“Do anything? That excuse is getting old.”

Espie weeps and falls to his knees and cries, “Please! I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’ve had enough. Make it stop. Make it stop!”

Lieutenant Major Ghauri looks down at him and there is a glint of something in her eye. Not pity, but a kissing cousin to it. “I want to show you something.”

There is a break in the clouds and Espie squints in the sun, and suddenly they are on a grassy hill in the shade of a large elm, overlooking a solar panel farm, and there’s a small city in the distance. Wildflowers speckle the hill and birds chirp and insects buzz, and the sun is high and warm, the wind is steady and calm, but there’s a strange ultraviolet glow in the sky, especially at the horizon, like the haze around a blacklight.

“This is where I’m from,” Lieutenant Major Ghauri says, and she’s not in a uniform anymore, but in a white plastic hazmat suit with a clear panel for her face. “This is the world I left to undergo spotchkai. The atmosphere’s ionized from all the nukes, so you have to suit up or you get sick when you go outside. We take pills to keep us alive, but the cancer comes for us all, because the poison’s in everything. I don’t know a soul over the age of sixty. I left behind a four-year-old daughter whom I will never see grow up, at least this version of me won’t, and it was the hardest goddamned thing I ever had to do. That’s how much I despise you, Mr. Droger.”

The wind gusts and a bird calls and from down the hill comes the echo of children’s laughter.

“We mostly stay indoors in buildings sealed against the poisons, except to heal the land one ruined acre at a time, to remake the world into the paradise you and your kind so willfully destroyed.”

“But I—”

“Shut up, Mr. Droger. You don’t get to speak. You had your chance and chose death. I’m showing you my world because I want you to know what we are building, in spite of you. I want you to know the future you will have no part of. It will take centuries, but the Earth will heal, with or without our help. We will slowly remove the poisons from the air. Ten thousand at a time, we will honor the dead. We will mark and remember each of their names. But your name will be a curse throughout the generations.”

A cloud passes before the sun and everything goes gray again, and they are back in the world of ash and smoke, and Espie cries again.

“When does it end?”

“That’s the thing about spotchkai, Espie. It’s an asymptotic line. It attenuates, essentially, forever.”

• • • •

Espie wakes at his desk, or maybe he was always awake here, and the boiler thrums down the hall, but otherwise all is still. And there are tears on his face, and his whole body shakes, and he feels like he might pass out from exhaustion. And his laptop screen is locked and Espie logs in with his long and complicated password, and the numbers shine into his eyes, equations and spreadsheets and complex tabulations dynamically updated with data from all over the country and world.

And Espie thinks, The real war hasn’t begun yet. Not the one General McHolland is fighting. Another war. A deeper war. A silent war. But it won’t be silent for long. This war is just beginning. And the first salvo will be fired now, by him.

And as Espie thinks this, Lieutenant Major Ghauri is also here, standing behind him, so that she’s only a shadow and a voice over his shoulder.

“Your country will curse you. They will call you traitor and burn your effigy and your family will be shamed and ruined if you do this.”

Espie nods and knows they will stand him before a firing squad or hang him from a pole or wire him up to a million volts or inject poison into his veins for what he is about to do. And history will never know how his system access allowed him deep into the country’s data, and how, with just a few pushes of his little black keys at his little basement desk he erased months, years, of work, including all the backups, because his superiors trusted him and gave him total access. The house of cards he built will tumble. The system he fostered will collapse under its own weight.

“You won’t be able to hide your damage, once it’s done. They’ll trace it back to you, Mr. Droger, and you will suffer and die in shame and infamy. This will be your spotchkai from now on. This will be your attenuation. You will relive this moment, diminished, forever and ever.”

“And you’ll never exist, because you won’t ever be born.”

“I am here to make expiations for the sins of the past. Yes, Mr. Droger, my timeline, my daughter, everything I ever knew, will cease to be.”

“That’s why you called this a suicide mission. You came to erase your own history.”

“And birth another. So now you understand the true meaning of spotchkai.”

Espie nods and his tears fall as he moves his fingers over the keyboard and sends commands to obscure systems throughout the country, and his index finger hovers above the Enter key when he is done writing and testing all his code.

“Together?” he says.

“Together,” she replies.

Her hand rests on his as they depress the Enter key, but her hand is only a shadow, then nothing at all, and Espie is alone, in the basement, with only the moldering cardboard boxes stacked on metal racks to the ceiling to keep him company.

They will come for him soon. They have always been coming for him. They will always be coming for him. This long lightning flash will attenuate forever. And so Espie waits. He sits and waits and dreams in the frigid dark because there is nothing left to do but dream. What else can he dream of? Again and again and again and again, Espie Droger dreams of war.