Munitions Release
Content Warning
civilian deaths in war, dead bodies, death, death of children, medical malpractice, mental illness, military violence, suicidal ideation, war
by Laurence Raphael Brothers
Whenever she closed her eyes, Captain Maria Hernández, USAF, ret., fell into the dream. Always the same. Always unbearable. She had a supply of Modafinil left over from duty ops, but the drug could only go so far in keeping her awake. Her pulse was 150 at rest. Her chest hurt all the time. At last, desperate for release from her torment, she checked herself into the PTSD unit at the Veterans Affairs hospital for memory erasure therapy.
Now she was wired into a treatment system, a superconducting mask over her face, a psychoactive drug drip in her arm.
“About to enter trance.” The therapist’s voice was cheerful. “Captain Hernández, your stress dream should emerge shortly. We’re going to have to run through the whole thing once to calibrate before we can break the loop. I apologize for putting you through this, but I’m sure we’ll be able to help you.”
The captain didn’t reply. She was already deep into the dream. Two user interface tiles floated before her eyes overlaid on top of video imagery: Munitions Release and Mission Cancel.
She was back at her old drone controller’s workstation at Creech Air Force Base. A virtual reality helmet was on her head instead of the therapy mask, and she was seeing through the camera eye of a heavily armed drone. There it was. The concrete building with the corrugated steel roof, grainy due to the magnification of the drone’s optics. Intel markup glyphs hovered around the target, detailing its coordinates, hardness rating, and military value: an ad-hoc enemy headquarters. A building in a rural village on the opposite side of the world from her Nevada base. Everything was nominal. No sign of civilians, no indication of any error in target designation.
She tapped the tile labeled Munitions Release. At this stage, it never occurred to her to cancel.
In her dream, Captain Hernández became the Hellfire missile streaking towards the target. The concrete building swelled rapidly before her virtual eyes. But before impact she slowed down. Instead of striking the roof of the building she came to a halt just outside the front door. She felt a rising horror and tried to turn away, but she was unable to alter the course of the dream. The door opened and she advanced into the building, hovering in the air as if she were a quadcopter toy instead of a drone-launched missile.
The captain floated into a classroom full of eight-year-olds. She saw a blackboard with words in English and Arabic. A rainbow drawn in colored chalk. No sign of the enemy. The whole class turned to look at her, but no one spoke. They behaved like she was expected. She saw no fear in the children’s placid faces. She wanted to apologize to them, to beg their forgiveness; but she was a missile. She couldn’t speak. There was only one thing she could do.
Detonate.
At that moment she wanted to do it. Blowing up would end her; and she knew she deserved it. She needed it. The civilians didn’t matter. They died every day, one way or another. She willed it and the explosion came. And with it the pain in her chest intensified. A fireball filled the room in slow motion. She saw children’s bodies flying through the air, swirling around her like rag-tag bits of trash caught in a dust devil, and then the scene went black. It was a gratifying darkness, quiet and still. But it didn’t last.
• • •
The therapist looked up at the dream-screen mounted above her patient’s recumbent body. That was a bad one, she thought. She tapped the End Trance tile on her tablet.
“Wake up, Captain. You did well. Next session we’ll clear the trauma nexus. I’m sure of it.”
There was no response. She tapped the tile again.
“Captain Hernández!”
Still nothing. It was only then that she noticed that her patient had stopped breathing.
• • •
Emerging from blackness, Captain Hernández clicked Munitions Release.
She rocketed towards the building, slowing to a halt outside the front door. The classroom again. The children. Their silent stare. Their calmness. Their acceptance. Fireball. Fade to black.
Munitions Release
The missile raced once more towards its fiery immolation in a classroom full of innocent children. She experienced it over and over. Each time with a growing sense of horror and dismay culminating in the revelation of the classroom; but each time at the critical moment she committed to the detonation. Voluntarily. Eagerly, even. She wanted the fade to black and the descent into oblivion. But then it began again. And again. And again.
• • •
A team of medics had come and gone, taking Captain Hernández’s body with them. The therapist was alone in the empty room. Her dead patient’s dream cycled on the screen above the vacant chair, looping. She reached out to her tablet, hesitated. Her finger hovered over a tile on the UI labeled Cortical Stimulus. The button she would have pressed to administer therapy. She stabbed her finger down.
• • •
The captain tapped Munitions Release. There was no other choice. When the Hernández-missile launched, she dived as usual toward the schoolhouse. But this time she felt a spark of volition. She knew what was going to happen next, and more than that she knew she couldn’t stand having it happen again.
She pulled back into a screaming half-loop, her rocket engines vectoring into a high-g turn. Far overhead, she saw a tiny speck, the drone that had launched her already returning to overlook mode, scanning for new targets. She blinked virtual eyes, and a targeting reticle appeared over the speck. A tone sounded. Lock-on. And now the speck became a dot; now a tiny flying cross; and now she saw it clearly, a General Atomics Reaper-II silhouetted against the bright blue vault of the heavens. Her last sight was the USAF stars-and-bars roundel, red, white and blue against the gray fuselage of the drone. Maria hit it square: dead on.
• • •
The therapist stared at the dream-screen above the empty therapy unit, disbelieving. A bloom of fire appeared high in the sky over the schoolhouse. Text scrolled over the display. Mission Canceled, it read.
About the author and the piece
Laurence Raphael Brothers tells us he tried a whopping 70 other markets before sending this unusual story our way. Laurence Raphael Brothers is a writer and a technologist. He has published over 50 short stories in such magazines as Nature, Galaxy’s Edge, and The New Haven Review. Check out his books and stories at http://laurencebrothers.com/bibliography and follow him on bluesky at @lrb.bsky.social. Pronouns: he/him.
©2025 by Laurence Raphael Brothers. All rights reserved. May not be used for A.I. training.