Roland paused. It was a good question, but the answer was difficult to explain. The technology for full prosthesis certainly existed. But his human components remained part of him all the same, for reasons that Roland didn’t really want to get into. But, he was forced to admit, the answer to that question was likely linked to why Lucia’s father had sent her to him.
It seemed he would get into it, anyway.
“If the military had wanted another robot, they could have just built a robot,” he shrugged. “As a matter of fact, the military builds robots all the time.” The battlefield of the twenty-fifth century was almost entirely unmanned; namely because most of the places humans fought over were extremely hostile to mankind. It was just good strategy to send robots and drones to those places, instead. “Robots don’t satisfy the need for ethical command and control on the battlefield, though,” he said, “Somebody on-site needs to decide when to pull the trigger and when not to. Somebody has to handle communications with locals and any person-to-person interactions that pop up.”
The problem was that a robot could not make the sort of life-or-death decisions in real time that a person could. Remote drones at least had a human operator somewhere to make the call, but deep in the field there was still a demand for a thinking, feeling, decision-making person. “We’ve got Anson Gates pushing us out to entirely new solar systems, now. We’re going to all sorts of weird planets, dealing with new lifeforms and landing in all sorts of screwed-up situations. We needed human boots on the ground. Space suits are just too damn flimsy and power armor is too clunky and expensive. Sure, the Army runs a few cyborg armatures at any given time, but most men are unwilling to be mounted to one since the army is already required to pay for prosthetics for veterans.”
“The first attempts were almost entirely cybernetic. The only human element they left was the brain and a portion of the spinal column; which they transplanted into a big, heavy mobile chassis.” They were essentially human nervous systems contained in armed and armored delivery systems. The result was a super-durable, highly self-sufficient variable threat response system with robotic speed and modularity, with a human being at the controls in real time and space. Or, “Tanks with brains,” as Roland explained it to Lucia, “Ugly, but tough as hell.”
“But the robot bodies with human brains tended to… uh… go nuts under the pressure,” was Roland’s truncated version of the problem with the first generation of cyborg soldiers. While the actual surgeries to produce these units were fairly successful, the minds of the soldiers themselves became very unstable very quickly. With no humanity to cling to, they simply went insane. Most committed suicide, several had to be decommissioned manually. Roland thought (almost wistfully), “‘Decommissioned manually’ is just a nice way of saying ‘blown to pieces because they went on murderous rampages.’”
“They tried putting human brains in android bodies, too, but that was only a little better.” This was a grievous understatement.
He went on to explain that the next attempts tried to minimize this effect producing a more analogous chassis. The theory was that if the chassis felt more human, more normal, to the brain driving it, then it would be less likely to disassociate in a manner that led to sociopathy. Those versions were supremely unwieldy and combat effectiveness was poor. Human brains in android bodies were awkward and a little dangerous; the control systems were just too incompatible. Also, these units went just as insane as the previous ones. The human psyche just could not tolerate a total prosthesis.
The researchers eventually realized that psychological stability was linked to the mental and physical needs and desires that people had to navigate as fickle and emotional creatures. Removing a human brain from all its needs, desires, and physical feedback; and then dumping it to a hardened weapons platform did not deliver the desired results. Roland said it succinctly, “Turned out to be a terrible idea.”
Human sanity, and the decision-making ability the program needed from its participants, required humanity. Roland continued, “A soldier in the field fought for something. They fought for greed. They fought for patriotism. They fought for sunsets out at the lake on a summer evening. Even a man permanently mounted to an armature still felt like a man. Total prosthesis took that all away from a guy, and it drove them insane.”
Good soldiers are supposed to fight for all the things that make life worth living and turning them into machines made life not worth living anymore. At least not as a human, anyway, and therein lived the problem. When life had no value, these former soldiers very quickly deteriorated into nihilistic AI’s.
Nobody wants a nihilistic AI piloting a hyper-tough weapons platform, it turns out. Suicides and catastrophic psychological failures plagued the second generation. Two notable members of that cohort found their way into action, but the rest either died or were ‘decommissioned.’
“Success rate was .01% for that generation,” he explained.
Roland tried to gloss over the grimmer aspects of these failures, but Lucia wasn’t stupid enough to misunderstand what he meant. Roland pushed onward to the important parts. “For Project: Golem, they decided to take a completely different track: They built a better human, but still let it be human.”
Essentially, Project: Golem scientists grew a synthetic body based upon each volunteer’s DNA. The new tissues and structures were grown to the exact specifications dictated by the donor’s own genetics, making the new synthetic body move and feel like it should to the nervous system controlling it. It was important to the project that the body feel exactly like a flesh and blood version to the brain driving it. This resulted in some loss of performance compared to more mechanical models. Roland explained, “Big ’ol linear actuators and high-torque motors would have produced a more powerful machine, but human muscle fiber was mimicked, anyway. They could have replaced my nerves with computerized electronic control signals, and that may have made me faster and more efficient, but the point was that the whole body would work off of the soldier’s existing nervous system and motor control.” He shrugged, “We were weaker and slower than the other generations. But more successful in the field because of it.”
“So, the short version is that to keep the guys from going nuts, they built an android chassis that was EXACTLY like the original body, just better. They basically grew new bodies out of better materials for us. Which was great. Except for when it wasn’t great.”
Lucia frowned, “When was that?”
“I’m gonna need another beer for this part.”
Chapter Five
Roland pulled his gloves off, revealing jet black hands the size of bear paws, “Yeah, well for all the trouble they went to keep us human, they sure as hell didn’t treat us like people.” He rolled up his sleeves, revealing massive forearms corded with black synthetic muscle fibers that that rolled and flexed exactly like human muscle should. Lucia’s eyes widened at the sight. She hadn’t realized it, but only Roland’s face and head had any normal skin tone. The rest of him was kept a flat matte black, because that was the base color of the surface chromataphors that allowed him to assume various camouflage patterns. He could certainly shift the color to something almost human, but keeping his body any specific hue took up power that was better conserved. Roland simply wore long sleeves and gloves most of the time, because life was kind of tricky for a guy who walked around looking like an onyx statue.
Roland did not want to explain this part. He knew that it would likely have a deleterious impact on what Lucia saw when she looked at him. Right now, he was just a big military cyborg; just one of many ex-military veterans walking around with government-issued body parts. But there was real, inescapable ugliness involved in his creation, and nobody wanted to hear about that part. But, it all had a lot to do with Donald Ribiero, so out it came.
“So. You now know that they deliberately left over some of the more… human attributes to keep us psychologically grounded.” Roland wiggled all his fingers in an intricate wave pattern to demon
strate his dexterity, “As far as my nervous system can tell, these are really my fingers,” he picked up an empty beer can, balanced on his index finger for a moment, then let it fall to his palm where he crushed it into a lump the size of a ping pong ball. “I can feel through my skin, even though it’s heavily armored, and I use my own nerves to do it. They get help from force-feedback sensors, but the actual signal still gets carried by my own nerves to my own brain, not a computer. There is no disconnect between what my brain tells my body to do, and what my body tells my brain is happening. I can hold a baby while punching a tank to death with no problem; the same way you can pick up an egg in one hand and swing a hammer with the other.”
The entire design was geared towards making the body feel as human as possible to the brain that would have to live in it. “This is why many of my basic organic functions ended up intact, even if they didn’t have much combat value. Preserving non-essential functions meant preserving the will to live and the empathy required to make the appropriate decisions in the field.” Roland grinned, “I still need sleep. That could have easily been engineered out of the new body,” but the languid, lazy, decadent joy of sleeping in until noon on a Sunday is worth fighting for. He summed it up, “but sleeping is part of being human. Good for the brain.”
Roland smiled, “I still need food.” Which left him connected to eating, and to the simple human joys of mealtimes. Sourcing organic fuel off-world was a logistical nightmare, but, he chuckled, “Steak dinners are worth fighting for, y’know? After your third week fighting aliens in an ammonia atmosphere, the thought of a juicy T-Bone keeps you going.” Roland could still have sex. That sort of thing was not entirely necessary when you are fighting a corrupted AI at a mining station on Enceladus, but getting laid was definitely worth fighting for. He didn’t mention that, though; it felt a little uncouth going there with a girl fifteen years his junior.
All of these things made life meaningful, and keeping those connections allowed Roland’s unit to not lose their minds. They still loved life, and so they wanted to preserve it. They understood what they were taking away when they took it. They weren’t machines, they were men. The small reduction in combat effectiveness was completely acceptable since they did not devolve into amoral murder-bots like their predecessors. Nobody likes an amoral murder-bot.
Lucia cocked her head and sniffed, “Makes sense, when you think about it. They wanted human soldiers, not organic robots.”
It really had been much more complicated than that. Rejection of the newly-grown techno-organic bodies was still an issue. Of thirty-six participants who made it to the final stage of integration, thirty-one suffered partial or complete rejection. Only five participants out of an original 230 applicants had made it into the field. This ended up being a blessing in disguise, because it was out there in the cold expanse of space a hundred light-years from earth that they found out about the fail-safe: or the actual reason they called the project “Golem.”
He found the next part difficult to explain to her, but she needed to know. So, he did his best not to sound like an asshole while telling her about how he had been used to murder hundreds of innocent people.
“My whole body is driven by my regular old organic brain, with no help from any cybernetic enhancements,” he gestured to his body, “Yeah, there’s a ton of nanomachines and computers managing oxygen levels, repairs, and stuff like force feedback so I don’t smash everything I try to touch, but that stuff is all hard-wired and hard-coded.”
There was no way to externally program (or reprogram) these devices, and this was intentional. “It makes me completely unhackable.” This was why there was no direct connection between the chassis and an external network. All of the enhanced imaging, tactical feeds and data acquisition that a cybernetic super-killer might need came from a helmet, and not through any sort of optical or neural bionics, either. “The Army wanted to make sure that these new soldiers could not be taken away by a clever bit of software or a hijacked net connection,” he explained, “There is no way to connect to the computers in me without a special plug, military software, and the ability to convince an irritable super-soldier that you are trustworthy.” He scowled, “Very trustworthy.”
But then there was the Golem. Each member of Project: Golem carried a secondary control module. According to the program leads, it’s purpose was to allow for retrieval of the unit if the organics failed. It was presented to the team as a pre-programmed retrieval AI that would animate and return the chassis to a predetermined location if the organic components failed in combat.
At the time, it seemed a reasonable precaution. Roland was tough, but he could still get knocked out or decapitated under the right circumstances. The Golem was in place to walk his body back home under those conditions. At least, that’s what they had been told.
Roland grimaced, “We were supposed to be real humans. The whole goddamn point was that we were self-aware and capable of making our own decisions,” he snorted, “but the powers-that-be in the military just couldn’t help themselves.” The threat of one of these expensive soldiers executing free will at an inopportune moment had been just too much for them to bear.
He had been the first of the squad to see it happen. A few years after the first stable Anson Gate had come online, Roland’s unit had been part of a force dispatched to quell a small rebellion on one of the first of the new worlds to be colonized. It was an ethical quagmire, and it was not long before the squad’s objectives had run afoul of what even the most morally flexible soldier could allow. It was exactly the sort of issue that had led to the development of the squad in the first place, so it came as a horrible shock when Roland’s commanding officer and friend turned into a mindless robot and executed an unarmed village of colonists. “They used a hidden piece of software to knock us out, and then drove our bodies around like kids playing video games to get the really dirty shit done,” was how Roland explained it. Saying more than that was just too difficult for the big man.
What had followed was a nightmare that Roland was never likely to overcome. At any time, their chain of command could turn their organic brains off and control their near-unstoppable techno-organic frames from afar. Any time they refused to follow an order they felt was unjust or illegal, they would be blacked out and forced to do it anyway. “Golem” wasn’t just a catchy project code name, anymore. It was their reality. Roland and his unit were completely and categorically betrayed by the planet they had sacrificed their humanity to serve, and made slaves to the will of their superiors.
“Sneak and Scout committed suicide within a week of finding out.” They were all very tough, but any decent military expedition had sufficient firepower to take them down if it had to. Standing in front of the dropship’s main cannons was all it took. Naval-class weapons had been more than powerful enough to vaporize their cyborg bodies, technological marvels or not. Their ends were quick and painless. Roland envied them, but he was not one for suicide.
“Both Lead and Comms died when they tried to have the Golem protocol burned out of their operating systems by underworld hackers.” He didn’t explain that the resulting shutdown bricked the cyborgs’ OS completely, and his two friends died in slow terror when their nanobots stopped bringing energy to their organs and oxygen to their brains. Roland watched them die, helpless to do anything.
Roland alone survived. He did so by following orders when he could, and getting shut down when he couldn’t. He still knew little about what his puppet masters had made him do when they blacked him out, but he usually saw the aftermath. Great smoking craters or stacks of burning bodies were the most common. They were kind enough to wipe his memories every time, but he was a clever man and he could guess what had gone on. He consoled himself with the fact that it wasn’t actually him doing these things; but someone still had to wash the blood and ash off of his chassis afterwards, and he was always awake for that part. While he relived this time, he spared Lucia many of the terrible details; she didn’t need them
and there was no reason for her to have the nightmares, too. He told her enough, though. She held her composure with stoic politeness, but he could see the edges of terror and disgust encroaching on her otherwise impassive face.
“When I returned to Earth, they sat me down in a cell miles below a mountain and told me that if I played ball I’d get a shiny medal and a fat bonus.” He snorted, “And if I made a fuss about the situation, they would shut me down permanently and leave me there to rot.” Roland had agreed at the time, as there was no real choice for him. He cursed his own weakness and cursed the people who created him. But he lived, and he played ball, and he waited.
“It was only the stupidest of luck that got me out of that shit with the Army. It took some time, but the incident with the Golems had gotten back to some of the civilian contractors who had helped create the team. Create us.” More than one of them took great offence at the shear Machiavellian horror of what had been done, and threats and blackmail began to erode the secrecy of what Project Golem had really been about.
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