Star Corps

by Ian Douglas

  “Sir, yes, sir!”

  “Drop the ‘sir’ crap,” Logan said. “I work for a living.”

  Garroway sat on the table, watching apprehensively as the corpsman passed a small, handheld device in front of his head and torso. A monitor on the console nearby displayed Garroway’s vital signs: temperature, pulse, respiration, blood pressure, EEG output, and cyberneural feed frequencies.

  “Corrective optic nano?”

  “Yes…”

  “We’ll write you a scrip for glasses.”

  Garroway had no idea what that word meant, though the context suggested something to correct his nearsighted vision. He suppressed an urge to do a search on the net; Parris Island was shielded from regular library services, and he didn’t have the codes to navigate the base military data stores.

  “Your heart rate’s a bit high,” Logan said. “And your BP is up.”

  “Of course they are,” Garroway replied stiffly. “I’m…scared.”

  It was an honest response, at least. He’d thought about what he was doing thoroughly, as his DI had suggested, and in the end decided he had no choice but to go through with this. But of course he had second thoughts…and third…and fourth. He’d spent the last thirty minutes standing in formation outside the medcenter, waiting as one member of his company after another vanished into the building.

  Thirty minutes to reflect on whether he really wanted to go through with this.

  But the thought of pulling out now, of transferring to another service—or, infinitely worse, of going back home to Guaymas—was far more disagreeable. Besides, if he wanted to be a Marine, this was his path.

  “Scared? Of the procedure?” The corpsman grinned. “I thought you wanted to be a big, rough, tough Marine?”

  “Hey—”

  Logan shrugged. “Don’t sweat it. Most guys make it through okay. Just remember that…if you feel strange, y’-know? It’s all up here.” He tapped the side of his head. “You can think your way through and come out fine. How many channels you got?”

  “Four hundred eighty.”

  “Library feed?”

  “Local Hermosillo Node, and a direct feed from GlobalNet Data.”

  “Ow. That’ll hurt, losing all that. Pretty hot stuff. Full graphic capability? Visual overlay?”

  “Yes…”

  “And comm, of course. What kind of math coprocessor?”

  “Sony-TI 12000. Series Two, with nonlinear math processing. Extensions for hypertrig, Calculus Four, and polylogmatics.”

  “Well, I’m afraid you’re going to be counting on your fingers and toes for a while.” Garroway watched as the corpsman picked out the injector and loaded it with a vial of what looked like clear water. Placing the device on the table, the man then looked toward the wall and said, “Right. He’s ready.”

  Part of the wall unfolded then into a tangle of gleaming tubes, arms, and sensors. Cables with EEG contacts touched Garroway lightly at various points on his scalp. Thoughts flickered through his consciousness, downloading through his cerebralink…a burst of violet light, a chord of organ music, and words, a gentle, female voice saying, “Please relax.”

  Garroway had been in AI-doctor treatment rooms before—each time he’d been given an injection of medical nano, in fact—but the experience always verged on the unsettling. A pair of robotic arms gently clasped his head and shoulders, immobilizing them in thick-padded fingers. A third hand, lighter and more delicate, reached down with glittering fingers and plucked the loaded injector off the table, then approached his neck with the injector clasped tightly in its metallic grip. Garroway felt a brief stab of fear…but then a gentle current flowing through the link dispersed the emotion, replacing it with a sense of quiet, placid euphoria. He barely felt the touch of the jet spray against his throat, just below the angle of his jaw at the left carotid artery.

  He imagined he could feel the antinano fizzing up inside his brain, seeking out the nanochelates clustered within the deeper rifts of his cranial sulci and dissolving them. It was imagination, of course, since he had no sensory nerves inside his brain, but the feeling was real and distinctly odd nonetheless. In another moment he thought he could feel the chelated contact points in the palms of his hands softening as well, as the silver-gold-carbon alloy of the palmlinks was absorbed back into his bloodstream.

  One feeling that was decidedly not in his imagination, though, was the sense of diminishment…a kind of shrinking of mind and awareness. For one confused and near-panicky moment, it felt as though he was somehow being muffled in layers of unseen insulation. His hearing felt…dead, as well as his sense of touch, and something like a translucent gray mist dropped across his vision. Dozens of separate sensations shriveled, as though drawing back from his consciousness…smells, sounds, sensations of touch and temperature, and even vision itself becoming less intense, less there.

  “Goddess…” he said, his voice sounding distant in his ears. He felt a little dizzy, a bit light-headed, and he might have fallen over if the robotic doctor hadn’t been gently but firmly holding him upright on the table.

  “Kind of rocks you, doesn’t it?” the corpsman said. “How ya doing?”

  “I’m…not sure….”

  “Can you stand?”

  “I think so.” He slid off the table, then braced himself as the dizziness returned, threatening to drop him to his knees. He swayed, then steadied, trying to clear his head. Damn it, where had the room gone?

  No, the room was still here, but he felt so oddly detached. He remembered what Logan had said about it all being inside his head and tried to focus on what he could see and sense around him, not on what was no longer there.

  Damn, he had never realized that the cybernanochelates in his brain had added so much to his perception of his surroundings. With his cerebralink operating, he’d been aware of everything within his range of vision. Now he found his visual focus only included a relatively limited area directly in front of his eyes, that he had to consciously shift his awareness to notice objects at his visual periphery. A moment before, he’d been aware of dust motes hanging in the air, of a scuff mark on the otherwise brilliant finish of the sick bay deck, of a three-K-cycle low frequency hum from the lighting panels overhead, of a small scrap of paper in the sick bay’s far corner…all without consciously focusing on them. They were simply there. Now, to his increasing dismay, he had to really look to see something and note what it was. The corpsman’s data badge no longer automatically transmitted rank and ID; he had to actually read the printed letters that spelled out HM1 D. LOGAN.

  And…what had happened to his vision? Everything was slightly fuzzy now, though he found he could tighten things up a bit by squinting. Ah. His corrective optic nano, that was it. He no longer had microsilicate structures reshaping his eyeballs to give him perfect focus.

  Was this really what it was like without cyber enhancement?

  “Man, where’d the world go?” he asked.

  “It’s still there,” Logan told him. “You just don’t have the sensory enhancement or the electronic processing tied into your cerebral cortex anymore. Don’t worry about it. You’ll be amazed what you can do with the equipment nature gave you.”

  Garroway blinked, trying to assimilate this. He’d been expecting something more or less like this, of course, but the reality carried a lot more impact than the expectation. Damn, he felt so slow, so muzzy-headed.

  He suddenly realized that he didn’t know which way was north…and he no longer carried a small, internal map of where he was and where he’d been for the past several minutes.

  For that matter, he no longer had an internal clock. He’d walked into the sick bay at 0800 hours…but how long had he been there? Several minutes, at least…but how long exactly?

  He didn’t know, had no way of knowing.

  “Go out that way,” Logan told him, jerking a thumb at a different door than the one he’d entered through. “Follow the blue line and join the rest of your company on the grind
er.”

  The door had a touch pad, but it didn’t open when he laid his palm across the slick, black surface. He had to push and engage the manual control so that the door slid open to let him out.

  The blue line was painted on the wall, and if it had a cyber component to it, he couldn’t feel it, not anymore. It led him down a corridor, through several lefts and rights, depositing him at last on the steps below the sick bay’s back door. The rest of Company 1099, those who’d already gone through the process ahead of him, were waiting in ranks. Sergeant Dolby, one of 1099’s three assistant DIs, motioned him into line without comment.

  The other recruits appeared as dazed as he felt. Most, he knew—the ones who’d not been able to afford more than a basic-level cerebralink system or who’d had to rely on government-issue implants—weren’t feeling nearly as dazed as he was, but all of them looked stunned, and several looked like they were about to be sick or pass out. Dolby walked up one rank and down the next, pausing occasionally to stop and talk quietly to a recruit who looked particularly bad off. The sergeant passed him without stopping, so perhaps, Garroway reasoned, he wasn’t as bad off as he felt.

  He tried to remember what it had been like before he’d gone to the medical center at Hermosillo on his fourteenth birthday and received the injections for his Sony-TI 12000. Before that he’d had a government-issued school model, of course, implanted when he was…what? It must have been around age four or so, but school models weren’t sensory-enhanced, as a rule, and didn’t store detailed memories unless a teaching code was downloaded in order to store a specific lesson. He remembered being taught how to read, how to research any question he could imagine on the WorldNet, even how to feel good about himself, but his day-to-day memories from that time were pretty hazy.

  It took him a moment or two to realize that an hour ago, those memories would have been crystal clear. His cerebralink helped access memories, even those that had not been cataloged in downloading. He felt…diminished…shrunken, somehow…barely present.

  The next thing he knew, he was lying on the pavement, looking up into the less than appealing features of Sergeant Dolby. He felt dizzy and sick, light-headed and cold. Dolby slapped him lightly on the face a couple of times. “You okay, recruit?”

  “S-Sir.” He tried to formulate the correct response—This recruit is okay—but failed. “Yes, sir.”

  “Stay put. A doc’ll be along in a second.”

  Five other recruits of Company 1099 had passed out as well. They were helped back into the sick bay by unsympathetic corpsmen, who laid them out on cots, took their vitals, and gave them spray injections in their arms. There was no autodoc or treatment room; without cerebralinks, they couldn’t be hooked into a diagnostic system. That thought alone was enough to leave Garroway wondering what could possibly have possessed him to voluntarily give up his cyberimplants.

  After receiving the injection and being allowed to rest for twenty minutes, he felt well enough to return to the rest of the group. Another hour dragged by as the rest of Company 1099—those who’d agreed to lose their cybernano, at any rate—passed through the sick bay and the ministrations of the AI examination room. Out of the original complement of ninety-five men in Company 1099, fifteen had refused to allow their nanochelates to be removed, and three more had been rejected by the AI treatment room for one reason or another. Most of them were on their way back to civilian life by that afternoon, processed out on a DD-4010—“Subject unsuitable for Marine Corps service,” a convenience-of-the-government discharge. Two volunteered instead for a transfer to the Navy, and three others elected to join the Aerospace Force.

  “Why,” Gunnery Sergeant Makowiecz bellowed at the ranks later that morning, “did we take away your implants? Anyone!” Several hands went up, and Makowiecz chose one. “You!”

  “S-Sir, this recruit believes that you will issue Marine implants,” Murphy, a kid from Cincinnati, said. “Civilian implants may not be compatible with military-issue gear or with each other. Sir.”

  “That,” Makowiecz replied, “is part of the answer. But not all of it. Anyone else?”

  Garroway raised his hand, and Makowiecz snapped, “You!”

  “Sir,” Garroway said, “it is Marine Corps policy to have all recruits begin at the same level, with no one better or worse than anyone else, sir!”

  “Again, a piece of the answer, but not all of it. And not the most important part. Anyone else?” No one moved in the ranks. “All right, I’ll tell you.” Makowiecz pointed at the sky. “Right now, there are some 2,491 communications satellites in Earth orbit, from little field relays the size of your thumb in LEO to the big library space stations at L-4 and L-5. They all talk to one another and to the Earth stations in all of the major cities down here. As a result, the air around us is filled with information, data streams moving from node to node, access fields, packets uploading and downloading so thick if you could see ’em with your eyes you’d think you were in a snowstorm.

  “With the right hardware chelated into your brains, all you have to do, anywhere on the surface of the Earth, is think a question with the appropriate code tag, and the answer is there. You want to talk to another person, anywhere between here and the moon, all you do is think about them and bang, there they are inside your head. Right?

  “If you go to Mars, there are 412 communications satellites in orbit, not counting the big stations on Deimos and Phobos. Same thing holds. You don’t have as many channels or as much of a choice in where you get your data from, but you can have any question answered, any spot on the planet mapped down to half-meter resolution, or talk to anyone at all, just by thinking about it.

  “Even if you were to go all the way out to Llalande 21185, to the moon Ishtar, you’d find a few dozen communications satellites in orbit, plus the mission transport. Same deal. The Llalande net is a lot smaller even than the one on Mars. Highly specialized…but it’s there.

  “But what happens if you find yourself on some Goddess-forsaken dirtball that doesn’t have a GlobalNet system?”

  He let the words hang in the air for a moment, as Garroway and the other recruits wrestled with the concept. There was always a GlobalNet. Wherever man went, he took his technology with him…and that meant the net, and the myriad advantages of constantly being online. Life without the net would be as unthinkable as…as life without medical nano or zollarfilm or smartclothing or…food.

  Their access to the net had been limited since they’d arrived on Parris Island, of course, but even that knowledge didn’t carry the same impact as the DI’s grinning words.

  “Don’t look so shocked, kiddies,” Makowiecz went on. “People got on just fine without instant net access, back before they figured out how to shoot nanochelates into your brains. And you will too. Trust me on that one! Awright! Leh…face! Fowah…harch! Left! Left! Your left-right-left…”

  Garroway was willing to accept the idea of learning how to live as a primitive, at least in theory. He’d expected to go the camping and survival route, learning how to make a fire, orienteer across the Parris Island swamps, catch his own dinner, and treat himself or a buddy for snakebite. The Marines were famous for being able to live off the land and get by with nothing much at all. He had no idea just how primitive things would get, however, until that afternoon after chow, when Dolby marched half of them back to the recruit sick bay to be fitted with glasses.

  Glasses! He’d never heard of the things, though he realized now that he had seen them before, in various downloads of historical scenes and images from a century or two back. Two pieces of glass ground to precise optical properties, held just in front of the eyes by a plastic framework that hooked over the ears and balanced on the bridge of the nose…Once, evidently, they’d been quite fashionable, but the advent first of contacts, then of the dual technologies of genetic engineering and corrective visual nano, had sent them the way of the whalebone corset and silk necktie.

  Those recruits whose parents had selected for perfect visio
n before their births didn’t need visual correction. About half of the company, however, had had nano implants as part of their cerebralinks—submicroscopic structures that both allowed images and words to be projected directly onto the retina and, as an incidental side issue, subtly changed the shape of the cornea and of the eyeball itself to allow perfectly focused vision. Contact lenses, it had been decreed, were too dangerous, too likely to be smashed into the eye in pugil stick practice, a fall on the obstacle course, or hand-to-hand training. Glasses, with unbreakable transplas lenses, might fly off the face but they wouldn’t blind a careless or unlucky recruit. And, unlike contacts, glasses could be taken off and cleaned in the field with the swipe of a finger after a fall in the platoon mud pit.

  They just looked as ugly as sin…and twice as silly. Why, Garroway wondered, couldn’t they just inject them all with a specialized antinano that neutralized the neural chelates but left stuff like vision correctives?

  Several times so far in his service career he’d heard people refer to how there were three ways of doing anything—the right way, the wrong way, and the Corps’ way.

  He decided that he was going to have to get used to the occasional seeming irrationality, to accept it as a normal part of this new life.

  It was that or go mad.

  Headquarters, USMCSPACCOM

  Quantico, Virginia

  United Federal Republic, Earth

  1415 hours ET

  Colonel T. J. Ramsey wondered what megalomaniac had designed this program.

  A dozen Marine officers hovered in space, like gods looking down upon the glowing red-gold, brown, and violet sphere representing distant Ishtar. A window had opened against the planet, revealing an orbital survey map of the New Sumer region along the north coast of the continent called Euphratea. The sense of sheer power was almost hypnotic.

  Colonel Ramsey was completing the mission briefing. “That’s it, then,” he said. He gestured, and lines of green light flared against the map of the city, outlining perimeters, zones of fire, and LZs. “The initial landings will seize control of the city of New Sumer and the immediate area, with special attention paid to gaining control of the Pyramid of the Eye. That will be the Regimental Landing Team HQ.” Another window opened, enlarging the map area around a prominent rise west of the city. “Before that happens, however, we will need to neutralize Mount An-Kur. That will be the particular task of your Advance Recon Landing Team, Captain Warhurst.”