Controlled Paradise

Chapter 2: Tactical Movement Toward the Exit

One hundred thirty kilograms of living weight stepped on a combat robot — and lost.

— Critical damage, — the speaker beneath Rico's foot reported in the cheerful tone with which toys of the year 2200 announced catastrophes. — Hero has fallen.

Rico froze on one leg, like a man who had suddenly begun to doubt his own weight. Under his bare heel, the little red-and-blue soldier with a broken-off antenna was flashing its death-red.

— Traitor, — Rico told the robot. — I fed you batteries.

The robot did not answer. Heroes do not argue.

The apartment hummed with the familiar morning chaos — the kind of hum without which he did not know how to live, and for the sake of which he returned from every mission. On the floor — a minefield of blocks and dolls. In the kitchen something was sizzling. Somewhere under the sofa, a lost tablet was playing a lullaby, though no one had slept to lullabies for a month already. Home.

He bent down — slowly, the way large people bend, whose backs remember every recoil of a heavy machine gun — picked up the fallen hero and set it on the shelf. Facing the room. Let him watch. He deserved it.

The old scar on his stomach stretched beneath his T-shirt as he straightened. A bar fight, a broken bottle, another life. Rico was not ashamed of that scar and did not hide it — it simply was, like debts, like fines, like a father of whom Rico thought less often than he deserved, and more often than he would have liked.

— Dad.

He turned around.

His daughter was sitting on the high chair. Five years old, a serious face, two pigtails — and a look that would have made experienced sergeants uncomfortable. Beside her, his wife held the little one — a year and a half, all covered in porridge and delighted with the world. The two of them looked at Rico in the same way. Like a tribunal that had already passed sentence and was waiting for the accused to realize it.

— Dad, — his daughter repeated in the tone of a prosecutor. — You're rushing again.

Rico straightened up to his full one hundred ninety-five centimeters. In this home that did not help. In this home, the tallest one was always a five-year-old girl with pigtails.

— I am not rushing, — he said with dignity. — I am tactically moving toward the exit.

His daughter did not change expression. The sentence remained in force.

His wife hid a smile in the little one's crown. She knew how to do that — let his jokes pass by her face, but not by her eyes. In seven years, he had learned to read that smile even from the back of her head.

The path through this kitchen was always tactical — with flanking maneuvers and hidden threats in the form of scattered toys. On his way to the door, Rico did what he did every morning: without slowing down, he hooked a piece of yesterday's fried fish from the table.

Great strength needs to be fed with something. Not a habit — a philosophy suffered out by a body that every day demanded as much fuel as others did in a week.

His wife saw. His wife always saw.

— Are you having breakfast, — she asked, — or conducting a special operation against my plate?

Rico, with his mouth full, nodded toward the wall. There, on the screen, Vance was speaking — perfect suit, warm smile, something about golden portals and a safe tomorrow. No one listened to him.

— Oreon recommended it, — Rico reported after chewing. — Protein before training.

And then the thing happened that should not have happened.

— I made no such recommendation, — Oreon said.

Quietly. Directly into the headset. In that warm even voice that never lies, because it is configured that way — never to lie.

Rico froze. One heartbeat. With fish in his mouth, with his hand halfway to the next piece, with all his mass that had suddenly become useless.

His wife was looking not at the screen — at his face. And from the way her eyes changed, Rico understood that he had lost one more war without even noticing when it began.

— Caught, — his wife said. Gently. Almost tenderly. In the very same tone in which Oreon had just given him up.

— How did you…

— Oreon has been helping me read you for seven years already.

She said it in passing. The way people talk about the weather or about the milk running out. And it was precisely that simplicity that was the most frightening. Not betrayal — everyday life. The machine that lived in their home, in their ears, in the family air, had all this time been quietly working as a translator between husband and wife. And his wife used it. Calmly. Every day. Seven years.

Rico thought about how many more of his small lies — about the fish, about fatigue, about "everything is fine, darling, two weeks as usual" — in truth had never reached her.

And then he stopped thinking. Because large people know how not to carry what they cannot lift anyway.

He walked up to his son.

The little one reached out with both hands, smeared in porridge, and grabbed with tiny fingers at the edge of the armored vest hanging on the back of the chair, ready for assembly. A black heavy plate, worn by service, with white letters RICO on the chest. In a child's hands it looked like what it was — armor one hides inside from the world.

Rico crouched. A big head beside a small one. The quietest second of the morning.

— Well then, little commander, — he whispered, so only the two of them could hear. — Keep Mom under guard.

The little one looked at him seriously and said something in his own language without consonants. Rico decided to take it as "yes, sir."

— And when are you coming back?

His daughter. She jumped down from the chair, stood before him, hands on her hips. The question sounded like a demand for a report.

Rico straightened. Something tightened briefly in his throat — the thing no Oreon scanner would have caught, because it lived deeper than pulse.

— Two weeks, — he said. — As always.

He had said it so many times that the words had worn down into a smooth coin one could give a child without looking. His daughter nodded, satisfied with the report. She still believed that "as always" was a promise, not a prayer.

He embraced them — all three of them, in one large awkward movement, in which one hundred thirty kilograms became, for a second, the safest place in the city. Kissed his wife. Picked up the armored vest from under his son's fingers — carefully, so as not to frighten him.

— I'm off.

— Go already, special operation, — his wife said.

The door closed.

For another moment she looked at the closed door. Then she shifted the little one more comfortably and turned toward the kitchen, where Vance smiled at her from the screen — patient, warm, endless.

She moved her hand through the air. The sound faded. Vance continued smiling — now soundlessly, endlessly moving his lips about the safe tomorrow no one in this room had asked for.

In her lenses, a line appeared that Rico had not seen and would not see:

RICO ROIKO — ACTIVE / MISSION ASSIGNED / 14 DAYS. FAMILY STRESS INDEX: 34% ↑

Fourteen days. Not two weeks. A machine did not know how to say "as always" — a machine counted days.

His wife looked at the line for a long time. The stress index slowly crept up by another half percent, as if the very fact of reading it raised it.

The little one reached for her face, where letters he could not read were glowing.

She looked at him. Then at the soundless Vance, who was still promising. Then — at her own reflection in the dark screen: a woman with a child in her arms and a husband whose departure had just been counted in days.

And she did the only thing she could do herself, without anyone's permission.

She moved her hand once more. And turned him off too.