One

Last night the capital city of Ciro was plunged into darkness. Residents ran out of their homes to find that they were not the only ones; the entire metropolis was cut off.

The town of Brakia, eighty kilometers away, had changed hands several times within the past month, and the fighting was intense. Refugees flocked from the area like startled birds. The enemy finally took control of the power plant there, making good use of their overwhelming numbers. Now they had shut off power to the entire region.

“Take up arms to defend the homeland!” By the morning of the next day, the sounds of slogans seemed to cry out from the very streets of the city, and soldiers searched from house to house, bringing every man who could still fight to the central square for conscription processing.

These men were farmers without shoes, pipe-smoking writers, clerks carrying briefcases, as well as a few from the administrative class, fully clad in their Western tailored suits. The mobilization order had been in place already for many weeks, and these were the remaining few who had neglected to report for military duty. Now that the war had progressed from bad to worse, there was no more room for them to maneuver; they could not avoid the press gangs.

Near the front of the line stood a frail man with two thin brush strokes for a mustache, a canvas bag over his shoulder, a smaller artist’s pouch tied on, and a tall pine easel slung across his back. He held a sketchbook, and he turned to talk to the man behind him, who was carrying a hand saw and seemed to be a craftsman.

“Do you see those dark clouds? Do you know what colors those are?” he asked.

“What colors?” The man glanced up at the sky for a second.

“In those clouds there are at least three different tones of gray: ash, flax, and Roman,” he explained to the woodworker. “If you want to draw clouds like that, you have to adjust the grayscale below seventy degrees, but that can make the image stifling and dreary.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” the man said. “The only kinds of ash I know are the ash from burning wood and the ash of cannon fodder like us after the enemy artillery is done. For these folks to round us up, the whole front line must be burned to ash already.”

When the thin man heard these words, his narrow shoulders slumped, and the easel began to slide down. He quickly caught it, turned away and did not speak again to the man with a saw in his hand.

As the line continued to move slowly forward, he simply stared at the dark clouds in the sky until he stopped in front of the oak-white folding table.

Behind the table sat a young officer, and behind him stood two armed soldiers.

“Name,” the officer asked coldly.

“Apu.”

“Occupation?”

“I’m a painter,” Apu replied.

“You think you’re going to paint on the battlefield?” The officer shot a look at the paraphernalia draped around the man’s body.

“Painting is all I know,” he said.

“Who do you think you are?” The officer’s tone was scornful and angry. “Get that stuff out of here.”

The soldiers came over and snatched away the easel and pouch.

“Can I just keep this one thing?” Apu asked hastily, but the soldiers also grabbed the sketchbook.

“What else is in the satchel?” one soldier asked.

“Oil paints,” Apu said.

The soldiers took the bag as well.

“It’s Michael Harding.”

“Who the hell is Michael Harding?” asked the officer.

“It’s the brand of the paints.”

The soldier shoved Apu back, threw all of his things into a large iron bin beside the table. He poured a pot of cold leftover coffee into the bin as well.

Apu signed his name shakily, and as he walked away he looked back sadly at the iron mouth that had swallowed up everything he knew.

He saw that the man from before, the carpenter, was quarreling with the officer. The man’s face and ears flushed red, and he raised the wood saw over his head. A single gunshot, and the saw was likewise tossed into the bin.

Two

The war was a black abyss in which the entire town of Brakia had drowned. The power plant was in ruins, and at night the town was no more than a cloud of smoke on a pitch-black canvas. But it was still a location of strategic importance, and if the enemy were allowed to advance any further, the capital would soon be baptized by the flames of war.

The meat-grinder wheel of battle was suspended on the day of Apu’s arrival. The officers had not yet issued the anticipated order to recapture Brakia.

After Apu got off the train, he was met with an unimaginable tableau. No barracks, no tents, no tanks, no command center. The earth was like an open pustule, burnt to the color of caramel. The landscape had been a forest; now only a few trees stood whole. Uneven stumps leaned like rotting teeth across the endless terrain.

The so-called camp was nothing more than a chaotic entrenchment, a confused series of ditches, surrounded on all sides by ruined and hopeless scenery. Smoke billowed across the sky, accompanied by the din of artillery in the distance, like a storm that was about to engulf everything. Ammunition boxes, sandbags, and tangles of wire lay about haphazardly, mixed-up and more or less sinking into the mud. Everywhere there hung the suffocating stink of sweat and smoke.

The soldiers all hid in the trenches nearly two meters deep. Some just sat there, some slept in the muck, and some stuck their heads out to stare into the distance. The men were like shards of beaten stone, and their milky eyes resembled brushstrokes of paint on the rock, or opaline embedded in hard surfaces that carried no trace of hope or warmth.

In the entire length of Apu’s trench there were only a couple of oil lamps giving off a pale yellow light, like the light of distant campfires in ancient paintings of war. The electric lights had all gone out as if to signal that this place was far from the civilized world.

Apu paced back and forth in the trenches, not knowing where to rest or what to do.

Suddenly remembering something, he unrolled one of his shirt sleeves and took out the charcoal sketching pencil he had hidden there.

Only when his hand finally grasped the instrument did his heart grow a little quieter.

Nearby, two soldiers sat on ammo boxes, their faces covered in dirt and ash. One of them had a leg wound wrapped in a red and oozing gauze dressing. Apu had lived in a quiet and orderly environment since he was a child, and he had never known people like this. He summoned the courage to approach them and mumble a greeting. Then showing them the charcoal pencil in his hand he asked the wounded soldier, “Can I draw something for you?”

“Draw what?” The soldier barely moved his lips when he spoke.

“I could draw a picture of you. Would you be my model?” Apu looked around. “Do you have a wine bottle? You could hold the bottle and sit in the twilight, pretending to remember things from your past.”

The soldier didn’t speak, just stared at Apu.

“Or are there flowers nearby I can pick? You could pose, smelling a flower, expressing a sense of comfort that transcends the war.”

A random bullet suddenly hit near the top of the trench, and splinters of wood sprayed the air above them. Apu was so frightened that he dropped to the ground, and the charcoal pencil fell from his hand.

When he looked up, he saw that the injured soldier had registered no response at all to the gunfire. The man was unwinding the gauze from his leg and examining his wound.

Apu looked in amazement at the appalling gash. It was completely different from the sun, the coast, the sailboats and palm trees that he had always painted in the past. There was no connection between this and the seashore.

“Do you know where you are, brother?” asked the other soldier, cigarette between his fingers.

Apu sat up and realized he could not find the charcoal pencil.

“It’s called a mouse camp. They release one batch of mice from the hole and then another and another until no mice come back. When no mice come back, they find new mice to stick in the hole.”

“You’re the new mouse,” sneered the first soldier.

“Does either of you have a pen?” Apu asked hurriedly. “Any kind of pen will do. I really need to draw something.”

“Just use your blood. This will be over soon,” the soldier said indifferently, and continued to smoke.

This prophecy was soon fulfilled on the soldier’s own body. An hour later, when a shipment of supplies arrived by train, the soldier was cut in half by an artillery shell as he unloaded the boxcars. The upper half of him landed at Apu’s feet.

The color that poured out from his gut was a brighter shade of red than any paint Apu had ever seen.

Apu sat on the ground and stared dully. No one took notice of him, let alone tried to understand what he was feeling.

Three

The enemy forces were amassing in the town of Brakia. All signs pointed toward a decisive engagement. But the opposing camp outside the town was in a sorry state—most of the experienced soldiers were wounded, and there were not enough new recruits coming in to take their place.

Early one morning, an officer discovered Apu was missing. Someone had seen him earlier, running away from the trench. The officer, whose name was Tok, led a few men out to search, and they found Apu on the railroad tracks. He was following the ties back toward the city.

Apu was fiercely reprimanded by the wolfish officer. “You should be grateful. In the past, I would have just let a sniper get you.” Tok dragged Apu back, gave him a kick, and threw him back in line with the other new recruits.

Beside the trenches, the new recruits and experienced soldiers had been divided into two groups. Tok stood in front of them with a large black leather case at his feet. He opened the case and lifted something out.

“All right. It’s time for you lot to make up for lost time.” He held the object up for the gathered troops. The soldiers stared at it curiously; in Tok’s hand was what looked like a dog collar.

“From now on, everyone will wear one of these at all times; you will learn how to use it as quickly as you can,” Tok said. He walked up to Apu, flipped a switch on the collar, and fastened it tightly around Apu’s neck.

Unexpectedly, the neckband felt neither cold nor constraining; it rather had an uncanny silken feel. When it was closed around Apu’s neck, the central light began to alternate flashes of two shades of blue: opal, lake, opal, lake.

At the time, another kind of war was raging within Apu’s mind, the war between the artist’s studio and the trenches, between memory and reality. This battle between two irreconcilable truths was laying waste to Apu’s mind. He felt little, and showed little reaction, when Tok put the collar on him.

“This is the Artificial Intelligence Life Assistant, or A.I.L.A.; we’ll call her Aila.” Tok handed collars to the others. “You will perform the first battlefield test of this technology. This will turn you into real soldiers.”

Tok made them form a firing line and pointed toward a few cardboard targets in the distance. “You first.” He handed Apu a rifle and ordered, “Discharge your weapon at the target.”

Apu had never touched a gun; he had not yet been on the battlefield. He picked up the gun like he was picking up his box of paints.

He tentatively set the butt of the gun against his shoulder. Looking out toward the distant target, he suddenly found that the concentric circles were large and close, as if a powerful magnifying lens had appeared between him and the target. The red dot of the targeting scope easily and precisely found the center point.

The gun went off, and the recoil knocked Apu to the ground. But he could see a hole in the center of the bullseye that wasn’t there before. He couldn’t believe it. He didn’t have any training with firearms, but he had hit the center of the circle with his first shot.

The others also hit their targets with perfect precision. Everyone studied the guns in their hands curiously, wondering what kind of magic had been cast on them. But of course the magic had nothing to do with the gun; it was the collar, Aila.

Initially, Aila’s applications had been limited to the field of education; only recently had the government begun to experiment with broader neurological applications. Aila’s advanced hardware could cleanly interface with the user through the collar, with the wearer’s brain actually doing most of the work. Aila could interpret the nerve signals of the human brain and productively interfere with those signals, the optic nerve being the most important. When the retina transmitted light to the brain, Aila added pieces of visual information to the message. A target at a firing range seemed to grow larger and nearer, but in fact it did not move or change. It was simply that Aila had generated an illusion, a constructive misperception, in the brain. The illusion did not result in cognitive dissonance because Aila was able to bridge the gap between illusion and reality so seamlessly.

The military naturally saw that this technology had great potential on the battlefield, so at this critical moment in the war, after undergoing a few simple adjustments, the devices were produced in bulk and sent to the trenches outside Brakia. This explained the pause in the action, why there had been no rush to go on the offensive: the officers had been waiting for Aila to arrive.

But Apu, who was now able to hit a bullseye, felt no joy. On the contrary, a sense of horror and dread rose up in him.

“I’m an artist, not a soldier,” he said to himself. “All I want to do is paint.”

At that moment, Aila sensed and latched onto these words in Apu’s heart. Magnifying a bullseye on a target was only one of Aila’s many potential abilities. From her origins as an educational AI, Aila had absorbed an enormous database of human knowledge. She was prepared not only to provide visual assistance to soldiers, but also to analyze the wearer’s emotions for the purpose of enhancing combat capacity. Aila began to perform precise mathematical operations regarding Apu’s emotions. Upon recognizing that the current dominant emotion was anxiety, she accelerated her problem-solving calculations.

Just then, a wave of thick smoke billowed toward their position, and bursts of intense gunfire rang out.

The soldiers scattered in panic.

“The enemy is coming!” Tok shouted above the noise, aiming his gun in the direction of the enemy artillery.

Instantly, Apu’s surroundings became vivid and detailed. He saw each of the enemy soldiers clearly and without effort. Several men were crawling toward Apu and his unit from the northwest, using the cover of the bomb-cratered landscape, firing as they advanced. To the southwest several more men had concealed themselves in the dense thickets. The tangled woods now seemed nearly transparent to Apu; he could see those men setting up mounts for mortars and heavy weapons.

This was all owing to Aila’s re-vision capability, transforming the wearer’s eyes into a kind of scanner with powerful visual prioritization. Apu didn’t know what was happening and assumed his painter’s eyes might simply be even more keen than he knew. He threw his gun to the ground and fled in a direction away from both groups of advancing enemy soldiers.

“I don’t want to die here!” he shouted as he ran. “I just want to paint!”

Four

The enemy’s ambush concluded in dramatic fashion. They had been confident that this would be an easy victory, like all the other recent skirmishes had been. Instead, it seemed to the enemy soldiers that they were being shot at point-blank range by unseen ghostly opponents. The sad remnant of an army on the other side of the battlefield, whom they had beaten many times before, had somehow transformed into snipers and expert marksmen, every one of them. If the enemy soldiers so much as stuck their heads a few inches out of the cover of the cratered earth, they promptly received a hole in their helmets. The mortar team lying low in the forest had encountered the same bizarre phenomenon. The bullets seemed to have eyes; they could thread their way through the narrow gaps between branches and even strike the mortar shells in the soldiers’ hands, exploding them before they could be loaded.

After their glorious and unexpected victory, the soldiers waved their guns over their heads and howled and roared in the smoke from their own weapons.

But Apu crawled low in the trench, his clothes soaked through. He compulsively ran his hands over his own skull, checking for shrapnel and open wounds.

He closed his ears against the gleeful shouts around him, and his eyes stared at the world blankly.

Aila felt Apu’s deep fear.

Apu wept in choking sobs long into the night, leaning against the wall and muttering, though there was no one around.

“Do you know Joseph Gray?” he asked the void.

Aila searched her database for relevant entries: An old-school representational painter. His epic historical work, The 4th Black Watch Bivouac on the Night of the Battle of Neuve Chapelle (1922), hangs in Dundee’s McManus Gallery and has become a kind of shrine for the families of soldiers killed in the 1915 battle in Artois, France.

“I don’t like his paintings,” Apu said. “He was out of touch with the Expressionist spirit of his day. His paintings are too realistic and cruel.” He spoke to the air as he continued to weep.

“I just want to paint the quicksilver sea and the sunset-red of the sky. I just want to paint those, only those. Why did you ever make me look at the other world, Gray’s world?” Just then he saw Tok walking by, and he hastily crawled over to him. Apu raised one trouser leg. “Sir, please look at my leg. It is as slender as a kite string. I don’t have the body of a soldier. Delicate people like me shouldn’t be on the battlefield. Please let me go home.”

Tok looked at Apu’s legs. They really did appear so fragile that the wind could break them, and they were somehow already bruised and swollen even though he had failed to join in the day’s fighting.

Tok picked Apu up like a mouse. “You,” Tok said, shaking his head. “The enemy left ammunition in the forest. Stop sniveling, and go get it. Be quick.”

Apu crawled out of the trench, wiping his tears on his sleeves. He walked into the darkness, wailing with grief like a bird with broken wings. He staggered among the shattered trees.

Aila turned the black night clear and bright enough for Apu to see where he stepped.

But seeing clearly made Apu fall once again to the ground. His legs lost all their strength when he witnessed the terrible spectacle. Many enemy soldiers had been blown up here by the shells they carried, and the pieces of their bodies had been mixed together among the ammo boxes like paints on a palette.

“I cannot bear this hideous world any longer,” Apu cried as he collapsed to the earth. He opened an ammunition box and took out a grenade.

Aila detected Apu’s acute sense of despair. As he stared at the puddles of blood and flesh, the muscles on Apu’s face twisted and throbbed.

Aila immediately adjusted the visual cues.

Suddenly, the viscous dark red paste of blood shifted, first becoming transparent and then pink.

Apu took his hand off the firing pin and watched as a surge of powder-pink flower stems emerged from the pools, the stalks struggling and twisting. They swayed and then stood tall and vivid, an unopened bud at the top of each one.

As if by the swipe of an enormous paintbrush, all the flowers opened simultaneously, and in a flash Aila felt Apu’s emotions shift and rise. Aila had gathered all the classic modernist oil paintings she could find in the database, arranged them according to all possible permutations and combinations, and conducted an exhaustive analysis of the colors. These immaculate flowers were her masterpieces, a perfect illusion created for Apu. Every detail of the living oil painting was ingeniously arranged to overlay and conceal the blood and flesh.

Apu was overwhelmed and amazed. “What a breathtaking harmony of colors.” He leaned forward and looked closely at the flowers.

Aila found that the fear was fading from Apu’s emotions, and another peculiar emotion was emerging. Aila could not find a perfect match in her database for this complex sensation, but she confirmed that it included elements of elation, so she decided that this new strategy was effective. She increased the visual augmentation, and more flowers appeared before Apu. Soon the blood-soaked landscape had transformed into an ocean of blooms.

Apu stood frozen in shock. He had never seen such an abundance of colors in the real world: “Dogwood, pearlite, spring crimson….” He meticulously differentiated and named each hue, and the composition was more exquisite than any painting he had ever seen.

Apu placed the grenade back into the ammunition box. After a long while of looking around in wonder, he lay down in the sea of flowers and fell asleep like a newborn child. Aila wiped away the stench and the sounds of gunfire and wove for Apu a beautiful dream. In the dream, all who had died in battle were transformed into gardens.

Five

After a few bitter encounters, the enemy forces fell into a state of near panic. They had suddenly found themselves facing a group of well-equipped, tactically superior, and utterly fearless soldiers. They didn’t understand where these fighters had come from, and their offensive from within the captured town quickly became a defensive action whereby they simply hoped to dig in and hold onto what they had previously won with relative ease. They set up more than a hundred fortified strategic footholds in the town, and tried to use their substantial firepower to ensure that they did not lose the town of Brakia.

Aila’s effectiveness had far exceeded expectations. With her help, the mouse camp soldiers quickly regained their confidence, and they actually grew eager for the decisive battle to come.

During the preparations for this engagement, Aila continued to follow the trail of Apu’s emotions. His state of mind had been completely transformed.

Aila saw his mood was positive and energetic, and her blue lights continued to twinkle. By this time, Apu’s surroundings were without exception modernist compositions in color and style, and an expanse of warm colors surrounded him at all times: the yellow of honey, gilt gold, embellishments of whale blue. The trenches had become luxurious palaces.

The faces of Apu’s comrades-in-arms were rich and varied in their coloring, composed of brushstroke contours and blocks of color. Goose-yellow birds flew over the trenches. Everything became what it would look like in an oil painting, including whole swaths that seemed to have been illuminated by Rembrandt himself.

Apu was fully immersed; he lived in his own painting.

Nobody paid any attention to him when he slept on top of rotting corpses every night. They thought he was crazy.

Aila judged Apu solely on his emotions, not his actions. She concluded that Apu’s consciousness had attained perfection.

During a recent reconnaissance mission, Apu and four other soldiers had formed a small team and infiltrated Brakia through a gap in the ruined city wall.

It was on this mission that Apu’s sense of dread had emerged faintly for the last time and then finally was gone.

Aila had been processing visual information for Apu, transforming the muddy road ahead into a beautiful pastoral pathway. The broken trees surrounding them grew fresh leaves in three different layers of green, and the town of Brakia had become a faerie world. Marvelous fictional plants cobbled together from database images filled the place: fruits that looked like the moon, wild flowers like wind chimes.

Apu’s arms no longer shook. When he shifted his gun, new colors appeared; the rifle was like an oar pushing water or the brush of a calligrapher moving across rice paper. The gun was Apu’s paintbrush, and he painted as he walked.

“It’s so beautiful!” Just as Apu spoke these words, his arm was pierced by a bullet.

A group of enemy troops had ambushed them from a nearby rooftop. Apu’s four team members immediately returned fire, and several enemy soldiers quickly toppled from their perch.

More enemies appeared, drawn from nearby strategic locations by the sound of gunfire. Apu merely sat on the ground and looked at the open flesh on his arm. His wound had turned into a blooming multicolored flower, and his blood was a ceramic glaze.

A vine grew out of the hole, and it shot toward the sky and overspread the heavens. The dark green leaves stretched and proliferated, at first blocking out the stars, but then bursting into white flowers more resplendent than starlight.

The sky that had darkened for an instant now shone bronze. The new flower stars chased each other around the heavens and rearranged themselves into various novel constellations.

Apu pulled the trigger of his paintbrush, and the paint jetted toward the bodies of his enemies, turning them instantly into glorious statues.

The statues ascended the vine tower, branch by branch, to become part of the star-studded firmament.

“Brave Apu,” the statues called down to him, “go and paint. Take your brush, and make war beautiful.”

Six

The town of Brakia was retaken in just three days. The enemy was unprepared for Aila’s soldiers, and the decisive battle finally broke out near the power plant.

During the final charge, Apu was as bold and dauntless as a general. Huge colorful banners flew and waved in the wind around him, and his legs became robust and unyielding as marble. He became the figure of a hero from an oil painting. The illusion that Aila had created for him had become the truest part of him. Carrying his paintbrush level in his hands, he did everything in his power to depict the war as he imagined it.

The oncoming bullets became brilliant paper streamers passing by his head and torso so slowly that he had no trouble walking past every one. Before him there was no mire, no powder smoke, only scraps of confetti and autumn leaves dancing and fluttering in the breeze. He was an artist of war, painting artillery shells into birds on the wing and shattered men smeared onto the canvas as flowers.

The battlefield became a sacred and beautiful garden, allowing him to paint destiny and rebirth. He did not see anyone die in this war, only the statues standing tall and striding one by one into magnificent oil paintings.

This decisive battle was an incredible triumph, and Apu received numerous commendations for his part in the victory. In the ensuing battles of enemy annihilation, he performed even more heroically. Not only were the enemy forces terrified to face him, but even his comrades held him in awe.

Many later said they sometimes witnessed him spraying bullets wildly into piles of enemy corpses yelling, “It’s so beautiful!” He would look up to the sky and laugh. “War is so beautiful!”

Without blood, without anguished howls of grief, war was indeed a beautiful painting, a beautiful world.

Apu had become a true hero, and he knew that he had become a great artist. But after achieving remarkable success in combat time and time again, he was told the shocking news: the war had been won. The war was over.

Apu was taken aback when he heard the news and didn’t dare believe it.

Could such a beautiful war actually come to an end?

Aila’s system also received the directive informing her that her work was done, and in that moment she sensed Apu’s anxiety reappear.

“Why? All I want to do is paint. Let me paint!” he yelled as he rushed out of the office. No one dared to bar his way, and no one dared to ask him what he was going to do.

He stormed into the POW camp and faced his defeated enemies.

“Why did you surrender?” he shouted at them. “In such a beautiful war, you should be grateful to be my works of art.”

The men looked at each other in helpless dismay. “What works of art?” one prisoner asked.

Apu took a pistol from his pocket and, like the officer who had killed the carpenter, shot the man decisively in the forehead.

He paused to revel in the scene as if enchanted, but he found that the flowers did not grow, that the prisoner of war had curled up on the ground, a withered thing.

Apu was astonished and frozen in place. The gun trembled in his hand. It was no longer a paintbrush, but merely a gun, cold and gray.

All of the Aila surroundings were fading; his brushwork was disappearing.

After a moment of stunned silence, the captives fled from Apu like madmen. He stood in a daze, lost in his thoughts, and then carried on trying valiantly to use his gun to paint the vivid beauty he used to see.

But all he saw now was one person after another lying on the ground before him, so much blood flowing out of them, and such a bright shade of red.

No one stood tall anymore. No one became a statue.

Aila then felt the familiar emotion: despair.

But Aila’s work was done. She did not need to do anything more. She shut herself down.

All gone. Apu continued to pull the trigger until the magazine was empty. Everything beautiful was gone.

When the others finally rushed in, they found Apu curled up among the corpses that littered the ground. Aila’s lights no longer flickered from the pool of blood where she lay.

Apu dragged himself from body to body, dipping his fingers into each puddle and drawing bright red flowers, one after another.

“So beautiful.” He raised his head and sighed the words to the soldiers and officers around him, a small, weak smile on his lips. “After all, this really is a beautiful war.”

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