A White Helmet and a Child

A White Helmet and a Child in the Rain

We have spent the last few days in the trenches, waiting for the others; the rain falls on us ruthlessly and turns the plain ahead of us into a veritable swamp. I had just decided to order the departure of a patrol when one of my soldiers flinches suddenly and waves to me: a silhouette, faintly visible through the dense squalls of rain, has appeared in his shooting sector. I signal him to wait a little longer and he acknowledges. He leans on the butt of his weapon aiming toward the uncertain shape in front of him. He edges closer, and now we can tell clearly: the person has a white helmet on his head; therefore, he is an enemy.

"Fire!" I whisper when the shape gets close enough, and in the same moment the enemy soldier falls facedown in the mud.

I summon two soldiers and they rush out of the trenches, grab the arms of the fallen soldier, and draw him to my feet. Yes, my soldier aimed well: the enemy has no visible wound. I bend towards him, raise his jacket, and with the control key, I open his chest. I pull out the program card, tear it apart, and throw it away while my soldiers are grinning with satisfaction; then, I replace it with one of our cards. One of my soldiers brings a black helmet, puts it on soldier's head, and wipes the mud off his face. Then I activate him. He rises unsteadily, and when he sees me, he salutes. I like to have many soldiers under my command. A specialist in psychorobotics from the Maintenance Center told me once, when he was in a good mood and felt like talking, that this pleasure of mine was the residual of a human trait, carefully bred and cultivated in commanders: Pride.

That's why we feel so good with more soldiers under our command. He also told me that this pride usually makes us good officers and keeps us from risking a soldier's life unnecessarily. I realized only then why I let my soldiers fire only when the enemy gets close enough to aim precisely into the armed button in the middle of the chest, the one that cuts off the vital functions.

Unfortunately, not all the soldiers hit the button, and then our bullets tear off big scraps of the enemy soldiers. We don't know how to put them back, and those spoiled like this remain abandoned in front of the trenches. At one time, the damaged robot soldiers were taken to the Maintenance Center where there were people who knew how to make them functional again. After the escalation of the war and the use of nuclear weapons, we found fewer and fewer people at the Center, and those who remained seemed too weak to handle the dismembered robots. The specialist I spoke to said that probably all mankind will perish because the radiation level greatly exceeded even the most pessimistic estimates.

"But don't be upset about it," he tried to joke. "I'm sure you are going to win the war."

"What makes you say that?" I asked him, puzzled.

He suddenly turned pale, closed his eyes, and answered me no more. I thought he died, like all the others, but in the end, he opened his eyes whispering:

"A matter of logic, my dear, a matter of logic.... In such a gloomy world, so full of smoke and ash, in which it rains all the time, soldiers with white helmets have absolutely no chance... they are too visible. This much you could have thought for yourself."

He breathed heavily several times and then added:

"When you win, you'd better hurry to enjoy your victory because the sun won't leave you too much time... and there is hardly anybody to take care of the Recharge Stations."

"By the way, what is happening with the sun? Why can nobody see it anymore?" I asked him then, but he didn't answer because he started to vomit and then he lost consciousness. He never came back again.

He was the last man I spoke with. Now I'm worried about my soldiers and I don't know what to answer them when they ask me why they cannot see the sun. Since the day of the nuclear attack I've never seen it again, and a gray twilight envelopes the Earth. We still have supplies of energy for some time, but, since all the Recharge Stations are not functional, we will soon have to charge our batteries directly from the sun; otherwise we are finished. Even when I go patrolling, I don't take with me the soldiers with the best reflexes, as I would like, but those with the most fully charged batteries.

I am still using that criterion, and I choose ten soldiers to go patrolling: there are some rocky hills in the distance, and I would like to search them in order to avoid an unpleasant surprise. We are meeting more and more black helmet soldiers patrolling as we are. We salute each other and mind our missions. It seems that the specialist from the Center was right and we will finally be the winners.

We don't meet people at all now. At the beginning, when we went patrolling, we happened to meet one or two... They were starved and ragged, and we passed by them without noticing them. Sometimes they threw stones at us, but they were too weak to hurt us. The last time I met people, it happened to be a family. They were gathered around a tree; the woman and the two children were squatting and squalling from starvation and cold, and the man was trying to get two scrawny apples down from the tree. He burst out a dry, hollow cry, realizing he couldn't succeed. When he saw us he began to throw stones at us.

"You bloody jerks," he cried in anger. "We will die and they will remain to tramp the land forever!"

"Shut up, shut up." The woman stood up, frightened. "Be quiet, or they'll fly into a rage."

We passed by them indifferently, as we had done before. They could say anything; their words couldn't touch us. We were programmed to slay the white helmet bearers only.

For some time now, it seemed these problems were over and we wouldn't meet people to disturb us in our patrols.

As we reached the foot of the hills, I set the alarm signals, as I did some other times, and ordered the patrols to spread out. I had just split from the others when I heard a short blast from a ravine nearby. I ran towards the place where the shootings were heard, and I saw a few soldiers gathered around a fallen body. I saw, as I approached, that it was a human: blood was flowing from the chest wound mixing with the raindrops.

"You idiot!" I said to the soldier who had shot. "Why did you shoot him dead? Did you not see he was human?" I have no idea what idiot means, but this was what a General Staff officer called me when I miscarried his orders.

The soldier showed the white helmet near the fallen body. "He was wearing it. I saw it was a human, but he had the helmet on his head."

A few carrots rolled out in the mud from the hands of the slain man. I kicked them, and then I heard a squeak from inside the hollow of the rocky wall. Turning my head, I saw two frightened eyes: they belonged to a boy only a few years old. He was frightened, but he was hungry too, because his eyes rolled anxiously from us to the carrots. Noticing that we weren't moving, he plucked up his courage and sneaked out, quickly snatched a carrot, and began to crunch it avidly while he watched us with suspicious eyes. The rain continued to fall heavily from above, ruthlessly hitting the boy's forehead. Maybe this disturbed him because he stretched a skeleton-like hand toward the white helmet, fallen in the mud.

"Don't shoot!" I cried, seeing how the soldiers' hands clenched their weapons. "He's just a child; don't shoot!"

They stopped, because they were programmed to obey their officer's orders even if those orders contravene the basic program. At that moment, the child put the white helmet on his head. The blast automatically left my gun and shook his frail body as he fell. I am a very complex robot officer. I know that he was a child and I shouldn't have killed him, but in my program is the deeply-rooted order to shoot everything that moves and wears a white helmet.

We remain motionless near the two bodies under the rain falling harder and harder. Our batteries are almost empty and who knows whether the sun will ever come out. If I were human, I would cry now, but since I am just a very complex robot officer, I give the order to set forward to look for soldiers with white helmets.