革命不是请客吃饭，不是做文章，不是绘画绣花，不能那样雅致，那样从容不迫，文质彬彬，那样温良恭俭让。革命是暴动，是一个阶级推翻一个阶级的暴烈的行动。[A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery. It cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.]-- Máo Zédōng, Selected Works, Vol. I, p. 28

INDIANA, 39 miles north of the Mason-Dixon Line
3:28 AM

In the armory tent of the Red Army encampment, less than an hour’s drive from the front, Corporal Arms Technician Cælia kept her eyes focused on the capacitor banks of an RAAS-C17 electromagnetic coilgun. A faulty amplifier circuit had caused one of the high-voltage transistors to blow; she had to solder in a replacement. The warm August night air was heavy with humidity, compounded by the fumes and heat produced by the tip of her soldering iron. To prevent overheating, she was permitted to work out of uniform; she wore a pair of olive drab bikini-cut panties, with a red star over her bulge, and a white sweat-soaked tank top that clung to her soft skin. Distant sounds of gunfire and explosions, far over the horizon, did not distract her from her work; she held her hand steady and carefully applied solder to the heated terminal leads of the new transistor, covered as they were in a layer of sticky, oily flux.

Standing behind her was Corporal Cinematographer Guinevere, a field reporter for the Propaganda Corps, pointing a digital camera at Cælia, who didn’t appreciate the added pressure. Cælia’s sweaty hand slipped, and her left index finger brushed against the hot solder. “Shit!” she exclaimed. She withdrew the soldering iron and held it away from her and the piece she was working on, then glared at the camerawoman. “Do you really need to stand there and let a million people look over my shoulder while I’m working?” she snapped.

“Yes, I do”, Guinevere replied, her tone unironic. “I’m under orders to capture shots of our heroic field technicians doing skilled technical labor, as an inspiration to the masses. They need to know what kind of work keeps the war machine running.” She kept her eyes on the viewfinder as she spoke.

“Well, if that’s the case, you could at least offer me something in return”, Cælia grumbled. “I don’t like being watched while I’m working. It makes me fuck up.”

“Cigarette?” Guinevere held the camera steady in one hand while she fished a pack of state-issued filter 100’s out of her cleavage. “Non-menthol.”

“So it’s not enough for you to intrude upon my privacy”, Cælia whined. “You gotta slowly kill me, too.” She accepted the tarry roll of brown leaves and lit it with the barrel of her soldering iron. Ooh, that’s a very cool-looking shot, thought Guinevere, zooming in on her comrade’s hands.

“Your tank top strap fell off your shoulder”, Guinevere remarked mildly. “I can see some of your areola.”

Cælia did not fix the strap. “Who cares?” she muttered. “I’m probably going to die sometime in the next few weeks. Hell, we’re only a few dozen klicks from the front. There could be an ambush tonight and we’d be fucked, because I can’t FUCKING CONCENTRATE!” She sucked in smoke aggressively and gave Guinevere another look that could kill.

“Ooh, yeah, that’s a real fierce war face”, the camerawoman said. “You look like you ain’t scared of nothing.”

“You’re lucky you’re cute or I’d fuck you up with this soldering iron.”

“So ungrateful”, Guinevere chided. “After I gave you a ciggie, even.” But finally she decided that she had gotten enough footage to take the hint and step to egress from the armory tent. “See you later, honey pie”, she said on her way out.

“Yeah, you hope”, muttered Cælia. “All power to the workers.”

“All power to the workers”, replied Guinevere, already on the other side of the tent flap.

Suddenly, the encampment’s ambush sirens began to blare. “Fuck!” shouted Cælia. She heard an explosion, impossibly loud, probably less than fifty meters away. Shouting and gunfire shredded the silent tension that had characterized the mood in the encampment. There was a whooshing sound and a sickening splat as a bullet tore through Guinevere’s collarbone, just a few centimeters away from her carotid artery. She screamed in pain and dropped her camera on the ground before dropping to her knees. “I’m hit! I’m hit!” she shouted.

“Guin! Get inside the fucking tent!” Cælia shouted, an edge of desperation in her voice.

“I… I can’t move”, Guinevere replied. “I’m losing blood. Oh god, there’s so much blood.” Gunfire and explosions raged outside, growing louder as the enemy advanced on their position.

“YOU CAN!” Cælia screamed. “FUCKING MOVE!”

“Ougghhh… Okay, yes, I can, I will”, Guinevere groaned, and whimpered and yelped as she staggered into the armory tent. Tears ran down her face as blood ran down her chest, staining and soaking her unbuttoned uniform top. She got down on her knees and tried not to faint.

“Shit, shit, shit”, Cælia exclaimed. She had to think fast. Then she remembered she was holding a soldering iron, and got an idea.

She put the hot iron down and grabbed a handle of whiskey from her bag. “W-why do you have that…?” Guinevere said weakly. “You aren’t supposed to have that… that much liquor…” She winced and stuttered as flashes of pain and sounds of violence repeatedly derailed her train of thought.

“I’m the arms tech, I can have whatever I want. Now we got no time for chit-chat.” She quickly gulped down a burning mouthful of whiskey, then stuck the bottle out at Guinevere.

A bullet whizzed through the side of the tent and hit the top of the whiskey bottle. The mouth of the bottle snapped off clean, leaving an exposed sharp edge around the neck. “Uhh, no worries, you can waterfall it”, Cælia said.

Guinevere did just that. “One last drink before the hereafter?” Her voice faltered, her breathing thready.

“No, bitch”, Cælia snapped back, “you ain’t going to any ‘hereafter’. You’re going to get good and drunk because I need you to hold still for what I’m about to do.”

Cælia picked up her soldering iron again.

“Oh, no no no no no”, Guinevere muttered weakly, and waterfalled as much whiskey as her mouth could hold. She retched in her mouth, then choked it back down. “Alright. Make it quick.”

The bloodstain had now spread all the way down to her waistband. Cælia grimaced and pulled the tattered, bloodsoaked fabric away from her comrade’s collarbone. Guinevere winced as blood burbled out of the bullet hole in time to her heartbeat. Gunfire roared overhead as the shouting and dying outside mixed with the ambiance of war to produce a morbid cacophony. Cælia tried to ignore what sounded like the engine of a light aircraft. She knew she had no time to hesitate -- it had been probably a full minute, maybe more, since Guinevere was shot. With no warning, she stuck the hot soldering iron directly into the bullet hole, plunging it in all the way to the hilt. The tip just barely reached the other side.

Guinevere screamed so loud it drowned out the sound of machine gun fire and grenades, coming from within a few dozen meters of the tent.

*****

An unparalleled rush of energy propelled Colonel Travis Waller as he brought up the rear of the 7^th Combat Militia Regiment of the Revived Confederate Army on horseback. From his mounted position he could see dozens of replica Stahlhelme on the heads of his men as they charged on the communist position with AR-15s. He felt alive, knowing he must look sharp in his double-breasted coat with broad lapels and brass buttons, the synthetic wool dyed gray to honor his Southern ancestors. His left hand held the reins of his horse while his right hand held the flag of the Revived Confederate States of America (RCSA): a Confederate battle flag overlaid with a white Sonnenrad in the center. He raised the flag high and hollered at the top of his lungs: “Fire at will!” He let his natural-raised Texan twang exaggerate, so it came out sounding like “Faahr et wiul!”

His troops spread out, per the drills they’d been rehearsing for since ten years before any communist uprising even got started, back when they still technically lived under Northern control. They fired indiscriminately at the tents, and at any communists they could see. The commies rushed out like a fire ant mound getting rocks chucked at it. Those who could, came out of their tents with whatever guns they had, and many of Waller’s men fell. But, with the element of surprise on their side, the ambushing regiment triumphantly mowed them down like a swarm of wasps getting killed by a can of Raid.

At first.

But then the communists got air support. They had planes? How the hell did they get that?

Waller looked closer. The planes were very low-flying, and he realized they couldn’t be more than four or five feet long. They didn’t have any pilots. They were drones. If they weren’t quite so big as they were, he could almost believe they were RC planes from a hobby store.

But it was evident that they were not made from any hobby kit that would be legal to sell in most states during Federal rule. They looked to be made of some sort of aluminum alloy, held together by TIG welding. Unpainted save for a red star with a white hammer-and-sickle on either side of the fuselage. They were prop planes, with what appeared to be gun barrels made of PVC pipes wrapped in copper wire that emerged out of bays on the bottom. They seemed to pick out his men with grim precision.

The 7^th Regiment began to realize they might be outgunned.

Waller swallowed his fear and held his chest out proud. “Do not fall back!” he screamed. He pulled back on the reins; his horse, Raider, raised up his front legs and whinnied. “Shoot them damn commie robot planes!”

His men split their focus away from bulldozing communist soldiers and turned their attention to the drones. Quite a many of them fell out of the air; they blew up as they crashed to the ground.

What Waller never lived long enough to realize was that this was intentional. The drones were deliberately carrying big banks of recycled lithium ion batteries all along the fuselage, in excess of what was strictly necessary to keep them flying and power the coilgun turrets. They were mounted directly onto the hull; the outside of the fuselage was studded with rivets where battery mounts lived. The vulnerable design was the point: as the drones fell, they exploded violently. One battery getting pierced would set off a cascade of incredibly large explosions that would bring a flaming mass of molten recycled aluminum, batteries from old phones and vapes, and flaming plastic, right down onto the heads of the Revived Confederate Army.

The 7^th Regiment began to thin out considerably as the stench of blood and shit filled the air. A drone emptied its turrets into a dozen men right before his very eyes, sparing him only because it ran out of ammo. He could scarcely believe how many of these things were in the sky, and spent a split second wondering at their supply lines and industrial production capacity. Then he realized, as more of these things were being brought out of tents, that most of them, maybe even all of them, were built onsite, probably many of them in the last two or three months. He realized this because the most fiercely guarded enemy combatants were not officers in fancy uniforms, but people carrying tools: toolboxes, welding torches, big cans of acetylene, big cardboard boxes filled with scavenged electronics, bulky computers ruggedized for field use. He ducked his head down and dropped the flag as the drone which had just run out of ammunition dove directly at him. Evidently they were programmed to go kamikaze on them when they couldn’t fire any more rounds; the drone narrowly missed his head as he lunged to the side and fell off his horse. It angled back up and used its cameras to select a different target to dive towards. Soon he turned his head and saw it blow up several of his men, who were shooting at it the entire time it was flying toward them.

He scrambled to his feet and thanked God for his continued survival. He looked one way and saw carnage as his men died, deserted, or surrendered. He looked the other way and saw something very peculiar: a topless woman, covered in sweat and blood, stripped down to her skivvies -- wait a minute, he realized, this woman appears to have a penis in those panties -- with a wounded communist in uniform slung over her shoulder in a fireman’s carry. In one hand she held an unbelievably large coilgun rifle with a worryingly large magazine. Her eyes burned with hatred as she glared right into his soul.

She pointed it at him. He heard a high-pitched whine as the capacitor banks charged up. “If you wanna surrender, we do take prisoners”, she said, flippantly.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“Corporal Cælia, at your service. Hands up for me if you please”, she replied. Waller complied. Cælia didn’t move the gun. “Hurry up and decide if you wanna be a hero or a prisoner. The first option is looking better to me every minute.”

“Why are you… why do you have your tits out?” he asked, stalling for time.

Cælia laughed. Then her face turned serious. “Had to soak my top in whiskey and stuff it into my comrade’s shoulder here”, she said. Her tone of voice was relaxed, like she was talking about a home improvement project. “Had to cauterize a bullet hole for her. Figured some kind of antiseptic could help her odds of survival.”

Despite himself, Waller winced as a twinge of empathy came unbidden to his thoughts. “Looks like a mighty nasty wound”, he remarked.

“Yeah, uh, I got no time for games, alright? So quit stalling and tell me if you wanna lay down arms or lemme test out this long-range hole puncher on you.”

The fighting was beginning to die down. Remnants of the 7^th regiment took potshots at the communists from behind whatever cover they could find. The commies were already deploying field medics to retrieve their wounded and fallen from the battlefield. The battle had barely lasted half an hour; it seemed like no more than a few dozen communists had fallen to his whole regiment.

“How are prisoners treated?” he asked, warily.

“Not bad, but you get forcefemmed. Meaning they inject you with estrogen and turn you into a dirty communist faggot like me.”

“I think I would rather die”, said Waller, as stoically as he could manage.

“That can be arranged”, Cælia said, casual as can be. “Any last words?”

She didn’t let him get out any last words.

He felt like he got punched in the chest by Bruce Lee. He fell backwards and hit his head on the bloodstained grass. Cælia put the gun down and grabbed the camera out of the pocket of Guinevere’s uniform where it’d been hastily stashed. Waller’s vision began to grow fuzzy and he heard a rising tone in his ears. Cælia stood over him, pointing the camera at his face while he bled out. He tried to speak, but only choked up a mouthful of blood. He panted raggedly and looked up into the camera as he felt the Lord calling to him in his last moments.

“This is a fascist I’ve just killed”, she said to the camera. “His fascist troops rushed our base before the crack of dawn, thinking they’d catch us by surprise with their stealthy horses and flags. Well, didja get us, Colonel?” She sneered at him. He tried to say, “Fuck you”, but instead he drooled blood from his mouth and enunciated it like “Vuggoo”. At the periphery of his vision, he saw scenes from his life beginning to appear, fringed with holy light.

Cælia turned the camera around toward her own face, awkwardly maneuvering it with her fingers in just one hand. “This right here, this is why the Red Army’s motto is: ‘This machine kills fascists.’”

Waller closed his eyes. He now began to see visions of every experience he’d ever had. Times he had laughed. Times he had cried. Time he had spent playing first-person shooters. Time spent on 4chan. An uncomfortable amount of time spent on 4chan. Time he spent running a far-right paramilitary organization in a compound in North Carolina. Then, finally, this. Here. Now. He exhaled for the last time, anticipating that he’d see Peter waiting for him at the pearly gates, or possibly he might go to Hell.

Neither of those things happened. His brain tissue, sensing a sharp rise in blood acidity, began dumping N,N-DMT into his synapses in a last-ditch effort to preserve nerve tissue integrity under hypoxia. The rising tone in his ears became a glitchy, almost alienlike warble that escalated in volume and pitch, like a garbled Shepherd’s Tone being gradually turned up in volume. Snakes of geometrically-patterned light criss-crossed his vision; a kaleidoscopic membrane of impossible colors was materializing before him, its surface morphing at impossibly high speeds, and he felt himself leaving his body as he began to accelerate towards it. He felt fear, and bliss, and cosmic wonder, but mostly fear, as he zoomed toward it at relativistic speed. “Is this the gates of Heaven?” he wondered -- and then realized he could hear his thoughts audibly, resonating all around him as though spoken by a crowd of millions in the Grand Canyon. Faster and faster, he approached the impossibly colorful kaleidoscopic portal, til he realized it was translucent, he could see just past, he reached out like he could just touch --

*****

Cælia awkwardly lugged the camera in the same arm she was using to carry Guinevere, her muscles bulging as they strained, veiny forearms covered in sweat, blood, and soldering flux. She had withdrawn Guinevere’s service revolver and shot Colonel Waller in the head. “This is how we finalize the transformation of unrepentant fascists into ethical subjects”, she explained. “The only good fascist is a dead fascist.”

She hit the “STOP RECORD” button. Heading toward the medical tent, she thought about what great propaganda footage that would make. How proud Guinevere would be. How many people back home would see it. She hoped that the notoriety wouldn’t make her have to do propaganda work full-time. She didn’t want to be a star. She just wanted to fulfill Guinevere’s duties on her behalf while she was incapacitated from combat.