by Jerry
“Am I cleared?” Skip asked.
The sergeant didn’t look away from his monitor. “Not yet, sir. Most of us just have a few dental fillings and an ID chip. I’m going to have to ask you to be patient a minute.”
Skip gave a nervous chuckle. “Not everyone comes through with robotic limbs?” He flexed his right hand and heard the faint whirr of actuators, though the doctors swore it was below the human auditory range.
The sergeant glanced up. “No, sir.”
Past the security desk, a familiar figure approached wearing a white lab coat over desert camo. He was flanked by a pair of soldiers wearing body armor, toting M4 rifles. But despite the intimidating escort, Dr. Augustus Cliffton grinned ear to ear. “Decker, give Commander Harrison the all clear. Punch it in under code 403.”
“Yes, sir.”
A soft tone chimed and the far side of the glass both slid open. Skip lurched out and Dr. Cliffton met him with a hand outstretched. Skip compromised and held out his left. “Gus, it’s been forever. What . . . twenty-two years?”
Gus hesitated then switched and shook Skip’s non-bionic hand. “Hey, Skip. Welcome to Sand Lion Base.” The years had treated Gus like a rec-hall punching bag. His face was weathered and wrinkled with a scar running along his jawline, interrupting the spread of stubble. But he had the energy of a cadet and the grip of an infantryman. “Don’t mind the PsyOps stuff up front. We’re pretty casual here.”
Just past the entrance, Gus swiped them through a keycard-security station and took off his glasses for a retina scan that opened the elevator doors. Even on that short trip, four soldiers stopped to salute and address him by name.
“Commander Harrison, good to meet you, sir.”
It was endearing to hear a bunch of army grunts going out of their way to remember naval rank. But the words rang true, not like some project-wide PR stunt to blow smoke up the new guy’s ass. Even if the limp didn’t, the hiss of the balancing pistons in his feet would have given away the cybernetics. Probably hard to give a Purple Heart winner grief after losing three limbs in battle. His finger actuators were dexterous enough for a crisp salute in reply.
But once they were in the elevator, it was just him and Gus once more. “What is this place? I’ve been in some pretty modern facilities, but this elevator looks like something from DARPA.”
“Facility’s EMP shielded, these walls are made of some material even I can’t pronounce, and this whole shaft is rated to withstand antimatter ordinance. How are Madison and the kids?”
“They’re great. Maddie’s getting used to the . . .” Skip cleared his throat. “. . . new equipment. Meg and Kenny think I’m turning into a robot.” He knocked on the white paneled interior wall with his bare knuckle. “So, you’re telling me we’re someplace important?”
The elevator doors opened and Gus swept a hand toward the underground cavern beyond. “Something like that.”
Skip followed Gus onto the catwalk in a daze. The cavern had to have been a dozen stories tall, carved out of the mountain’s heart; they were at the mid-line. Below, electric vehicles whirred, air wrenches jackhammered, and welders sparked. Above, cranes and power conduits dangled.
But in the center of it all was a giant metallic statue, waist-high to their vantage. Its enameled surface caught the light from overhead LED spotlights, giving it a factory-fresh gleam. The articulation pistons at the joints reminded Skip of his own prosthetics, scaled up to titanic proportions.
“What the hell is that? An infantry suit for King Kong?”
Gus clapped him on the back. “No. For you.”
* * *
By the time Skip settled into his assigned quarters back in the innocuous base on the surface, his mind was spilling out his ears. Gus had shown him around the operations center, the control and monitoring stations, the programmers’ cubicles, and the maintenance bay. But the mindblowing capstone to the tour had been the mech itself—the Beowulf. It wasn’t just an infantry mech suit, which was little more than medieval armor with muscular amplification actuators. This was the dawn of a new age of mechanized combat: weapons that acted directly on their own initiative, possessed of a human mind.
For on-base accommodations, the little apartment he had been assigned was state of the art. Ice-box air conditioning instantly began to cool the sweat that plastered Skip’s uniform to his skin. The furniture smelled of new plastic and leather. Everything had a whiff of ammonia from a recent cleaning. Next to the door, there was a wall panel with temperature and light controls. With a shiver and a chuckle that the army was still using Fahrenheit, he did some quick math and bumped the temperature up to 70 degrees.
Desert dust had coated Skip in a fine layer during his forays between buildings. His muscles ached from the longest day on his feet since rehab. He needed sleep, but more than that he needed a shower. The apartment’s bathroom was equipped with a hybrid tub/shower, and for a moment he was tempted to give in, get off his feet, and soak. But if there was one thing today had proved, it was that there was still a pilot inside him. And Skip Harrison would be damned if he would let a decorated navy pilot soak in a tub like an old geezer.
Taking off his clothes used to be something he had never given a second thought. Now it was like trying to unbutton a shirt with a winter glove on one hand. The doctors and therapists all told him that his manual dexterity would improve with practice, as his neurons continued to integrate the new sensations, and he knew he was getting better at daily tasks. It was the lack of tactile feedback that got to him. It would never be the same as having real fingers again.
Skip tried to pull his legs out of his pant legs. All he accomplished was getting stuck as the leg refused to slide along the path he needed. This used to be the simplest of daily tasks; now it was a puzzle. After five frustrating attempts, he pounded a fist on the incompetent knee joint. His fleshy hand throbbed and he had to flex the fingers to make sure he hadn’t broken anything. After that, he treated his legs like dead weight once he had bent them enough that he could reach his feet. At that point he slid the pants down to his ankles and yanked them off.
Seated on the cold tile of the bathroom floor, he stared at his bionic legs. Flesh and bone ended at interface sockets halfway up his thighs, grafted permanently in place. Inescapable. Part of him, but alien. Below the socket, the support struts and actuators were eerily reminiscent of the Beowulf. One of those struts was the bottom half of a titanium femur that ran inside him all the way up to the hip joint. Hard to tell sometimes where the man ended and the machine began. Well, that wasn’t going to get any easier to tell, the way this mission was aiming.
You will be the future, Gus had said. The words echoed in Skip’s mind as cool water cascaded over him. No more human pilots. No more maimed limbs. No more lost lives. If anyone had told him a week ago that they wanted to map his brain, he’d have told them to go screw themselves. But there were only two ways to pilot a vehicle: by remote or with a live, human pilot. And between signal security breaches, jamming, and latency issues, the military was leaning farther and farther from remote-operated vehicles.
In the back of his mind, Skip worried about getting electrocuted by a short circuit every time he stepped into the shower. The doctors had promised everything was completely safe, but it wasn’t their asses on the line. Still, he couldn’t just go on stinking with sweat from the short ride topside to his barracks. The paltry coolant systems built into his new limbs kept them from overheating, but the rest of him was on its own.
Skip leaned against the shower wall. One hand felt smooth tile and rough lines of grout between them. The other gave a vague impression of solid resistance and nothing more. The difference between man and machine. Even if this project were a pipe dream. Even if Gus and his colleagues could never pull it off. Even if this was the worst idea in the history of mankind—and Skip had read enough science fiction as a kid to realize it might be—they were going to try it anyway. If someone’s brain was going to be the baseline of autonomou
s military AI, Skip would rather it was him than the next name the Army pulled out of a hat.
* * *
The next morning, Skip reported to work. His own retina scan now gained him access to the underground bunker, and the soldiers who accompanied him felt more like bodyguards than a security escort. Since agreeing to the piloting program, he was a VIP. He had met General Keith Kogane, who had flown in from Washington for the occasion. Gus introduced him to more techs and junior officers than he could possibly have hoped to keep straight. Skip imagined that this was how Alan Shepard got treated the day before he went into space.
But once the pomp and celebrity treatment died down, and the onlookers drifted back to their assigned posts, Skip was left in the hands of scientists and techs. Gus left him for the time being, having overarching aspects of the project to supervise. Skip wasn’t sure he’d have wanted Gus right there, anyway. It was easier getting manhandled by strangers.
He had lain awake imagining the process. He had pictured a cockpit, a few electrodes, and maybe some vital-sign monitors. And he had certainly had all his clothes on—a flight suit, even. But as a pair of army corporals helped lower him into the pod, he was glad they had left him his skivvies. They even shaved his head.
Once seated, Skip’s participation no longer seemed to be required. His legs were clamped in place, followed by his ams, locking him into the seat. Something one of the techs attached interrupted the signals to his prosthetics, rendering them dead hunks of metal. “Hey! I’m not going anywhere.”
The tech continued to work, opening a plastic toolbox and withdrawing an IV needle. “Sorry, sir. We don’t want stray signals in the pod.” He raised a vein in Skip’s good arm and stuck the needle in, taping it in place and hooking up a tube that disappeared into the pod’s internals.
Trying his best to relax as needles, probes, and God-knew-what other devices were attached to him, Skip craned his neck and looked up. Right above him were a gantry and crane that would transfer his pod to the Beowulf once he was done being turned into a pincushion. Out of his peripheral vision, he saw a dome filled with spikes and wires swinging slowly down from behind him.
Firm hands covered in latex took hold of him behind the neck and under the chin. “Look straight ahead, sir.”
Skip took a slow breath and complied. This was what he signed up for after all. No use being a pansy about it when he was probably closing in on the final stages of the prep drudgery. The edge of the dome came into view, stopping when it overhung his brow like the brim of a baseball cap. Servo motors whirred, and several rubber-coated tips pressed against his skull from all sides. The hands remained in place, and Skip kept his neck muscles slack on the assumption that if he tried to position himself, it would just take longer.
But the rubber tips kept on pressing. The motors kept whirring. Skip gritted his teeth, but a grunt of pain escaped despite his best efforts. “Gah.” The motors stopped and reversed. The pressure backed off, if only slightly. The latex-coated hands retreated.
“Turn your head left, then right.”
Skip tried, but all he got for his efforts was a set of rubber-tipped rods digging in all the harder. “Nothing.”
“Good. You’ll be glad of that in a second.”
A pinprick. Then another. Skip stopped trying to count after a few minutes. Everything was taking place outside his field of view, and so far, everything only seemed to get worse once he knew what was going on. So he kept quiet and let his inadequate imagination fill in those unpleasant details.
The first familiar thing about the whole process was when they brought over a mask that looked like ones Skip had used all his career. It had that fresh-from-the-box rubbery smell, but before they placed it over his face, someone smeared it with a clear paste all around the gasket. When it pressed over his face, there was a whiff of pumped-in oxygen.
“Just breathe normally, sir.”
Skip grinned beneath the mask. “I’ve worn these things before, soldier. Standard issue in my part of the sky.”
“Please try to hold still until the sealant cures.” So much for injecting levity.
There were pinching sensations of needles at either side of his neck. Something small and plastic tickled the inside of his ear canal, and then again at the other. The techs pressed something directly against his eardrums and he felt something warm being trickled in from either side. “Hey, what are you—?”
“Please hold still, sir. Those are just your comm system.” The words came through muddy, as if he had swimmer’s ear.
The hands came off his oxygen mask and the straps were snugged behind his head. He tried instinctively to wiggle it into a more comfortable position, but it was glued in place, plus his neck muscles had gone completely slack.
“Testing. Testing. Commander Harrison, can you hear me?” It was Gus’s voice, crisp and plain as if he were standing in Skip’s head.
Since Gus was keeping things professional, he replied in kind. “Affirmative, Dr. Cliffton. Loud and clear.”
“Good. We’re almost ready to begin. Just hang in there.”
The briefing had mentioned goggles, but they weren’t what Skip had pictured. These were better suited to swimming, and again they were smeared with adhesive. Skip squeezed his eyes shut while they were held in place. When he opened them, the world was blurry and warped. “Not much field of vision through these, doctor.”
“Bear with us.”
The techs backed away, though Skip felt it more than he saw or heard. A minute later, the canopy of the pod was set into place. Everything went dark. “Hey, what’s going on?”
In response, a dull glow lit the interior. Between the cheap plastic goggles and the lack of features on the inside of the canopy, it wasn’t much different from the darkness. There was a thump that echoed in the interior, followed by a churning, chugging that Skip guessed was a pump. The pod had filled to his waist before Skip realized that some viscous liquid was being injected in with him.
“What is this stuff?”
“Non-Euclidean fluid. Specs are classified. Great stuff, though. Shock absorbent. Like a full-body air-bag at the ready.”
“Thought this was just a test run. I didn’t even have anything like this flying combat missions.”
“And look where that got you? Besides, the stuff is dense as motor oil. Can’t take that weight in a jet. The Beowulf hardly notices the difference.”
Skip waited as the level climbed, the glow from the emergency lighting reflecting off the surface as it rose until the fluid covered his goggles. He kept his breathing as steady as possible to prevent a rising panic that was threatening to well up and take over. He was trapped in a cockpit. The last time he could have said that, he was on fire and plummeting toward earth, fumbling for the eject lever in his F-54. This time would be different.
The pump stopped, and the pod was jarred. A sudden sense of heaviness came, followed almost instantly by a feeling of weightlessness. Something jarred the pod once again, then all was still. He had to be inside the Beowulf.
Excitement and fear warred inside him, quickening Skip’s breath. He watched intently through the swimmer’s goggles, waiting for some sort of futuristic heads-up display to appear. All he saw was the continuous dull red glow of the emergency lights.
“Ready when you are.” Maybe if they knew he was raring to go, Gus and his lackeys might speed things up. There was no place he had to be, but breakfast was hours ago, and he couldn’t imagine they’d be stopping for a lunch break.
“All right. Now commander, this is going to be a little disorienting.”
“Hit me with your best—”
Skip’s boast was lost in vertigo. The emergency lighting disappeared. He wasn’t in the cockpit anymore. He stared into the glassed-in control booth at eye level. The periphery of his vision was filled with status and tactical information, arranged in an unfamiliar configuration but unmistakably a heads-up display. Each time he glanced at one of the readouts, it centered itself in his
field of vision and magnified. There was no Beowulf. He was the Beowulf.
“Commander Harrison, report. We show successful interface. Please confirm.”
“How’d you do this?”
“The system bypasses your optic nerve. The distributor node in your brain that controls your prosthetics made you an ideal candidate. Anyone else would have needed surgical alteration prior to interfacing. But our system is based on the same tech they used at Bethesda to put you back together.”
“This all looks so real . . .”
“It’s better than real. Your visual cortex is showing a light strain under the effort of resolving an image with more data than it’s used to. I’ll dial it back slightly. No point wearing you out on the first day. We’ve got plenty of work on the docket.”
Gus wasn’t kidding about that part. Skip spent the day running through calibration and basic coordination drills. The mech did little more than calisthenics in the underground hangar all day, never moving from that one spot. But by the time they extracted him from the probes, needles, and slime of the pod, Skip was exhausted and starving.
But he was grinning.
* * *
There was a knock at Skip’s door. He turned off the shower and wrapped a towel around his waist. He was still trying to remove the last of the adhesive residue from around his face, and the odor of the shock-absorbent fluid clung to him like skunk spray. This was his third trip through the rinse cycle to be rid of both.
“Just a minute.” There was decorum to consider. He gave himself a quick pat-down and struggled into pants and a shirt as quickly as he could. Mindful of not keeping his visitor waiting, he opted not to spend the time it would take to do the buttons.
He pulled the door open, expecting to see Gus or General Kogane. Instead, there was a woman in fatigues. She saluted. “Sir, I’m Captain Fiona Walsh.”
Skip snapped to attention, returning the salute while doing his best to hold his shirt closed with his good hand. Then he relaxed just slightly. “Wait, you’re the kind of captain that doesn’t outrank me, aren’t you?”