Warriors [Anthology]

by George R. R.

  With three in the circuit, that couldn’t happen. At first, there was a kind of existential battle for possession, for “turf,” but with experience, it became obvious that each person had to hold on to his or her own sense of “I,” or the asymmetries would drive everybody crazy. It was hard for me and Carolyn, and a few other pairs, like Samantha and Arlie, to let go of one another and let a third person in, but if you didn’t, the triad would never work together. One person always on the outside, looking in on a love feast.

  We spent a lot of time, about four days, switching around among triads. That made the foursomes and larger groups pretty simple, having mastered the basic trick: Each of us was an “I” identified by the life story we had when we weren’t jacked, but you had a number of partners, between two and nine of them, each with the same degree of autonomy as you, who intimately shared their pasts and presence.

  We could be jacked for a maximum of only two hours running, followed by at least thirty minutes unplugged, which was frustrating. It would be years before we understood why: if you stayed jacked for too long, the feeling of empathy with others became so strong that any human became a part of you; killing anybody would be as impossible as suicide. Which could be a real handicap for a soldier.

  We did learn about soldiering at visceral secondhand, by jacking into crystals other people had recorded during battle. It was confusing at first, because you were intimate with ten strangers, and you had no physical control over the soldierboy you inhabited. But the combat was real enough, more real than it could ever be, secondhand, merely human.

  Candi was deeply depressed by the experience, and I think only Mel was eager to repeat it. But we all saw how necessary it was. A dress rehearsal for Hell.

  * * * *

  I was surprised when they made me platoon leader. I was the oldest, but not by much, and the most educated, but particle physics wasn’t exactly relevant to leadership. The unflattering truth became obvious early on. They didn’t want a “natural leader,” like Lou or Candi, in charge, because he or she would take over the platoon too completely—instead of ten people working in concert, you’d have one guy making all the decisions, with nine people reviewing them after the fact. That would mirror old-fashioned hierarchic military organization, with the alpha male calling the shots and the lesser doggies falling into line. But if that happened, you’d just wasted a lot of time and money, and risked ten brains in surgery, for no advantage. A soldierboy platoon was like one huge machine that could take over acres of battlefield, making instant decisions with a kind of gestalt intelligence. It was eerie to watch, but became less and less strange to be part of.

  We had the minor surgery that took care of nutrition, hydration, and excretion, recovered for a couple of days, and then went out on our first “field exercise”—in the middle of enemy territory.

  The ten of us, of course, were safe underground, in a bombproof bunker in Portobello. But our soldierboys walked out ten miles beyond the perimeter, where any pedro could risk his life and attack. But there was an experienced hunter-killer platoon in a protective circle around our machines. Safer than sitting at home, watching it on the cube. You could get struck by lightning there.

  * * * *

  We had two more walkabouts like that, never confronting an enemy, and then Basic was over, and we could go home for twenty days. None of us went straight home, though. We had to try the jack joints that ringed the base at Portobello.

  At a jack joint, you could pay to plug into other people’s experiences. A lot of them were records of soldierboy battle encounters, which we didn’t have to pay for, thank you. The flyboy crystals did look appealing, “being” an aircraft capable of banks and dives and accelerations that no human pilot could execute.

  But apart from the military ones, there were adventure crystals, of people doing dangerous things in odd places, and “appetite” ones, where you could experience food and drink you could never afford. There were even suicide crystals, for the most extreme experience possible, though you had to sign a waiver before they’d let you enjoy it, in case you empathized enough to die yourself. It was the ultimate in something, like that Japanese sushi with natural neurotoxins, that will kill you if the chef makes a mistake.

  And of course, there was sex. Sex with beautiful people who in real life would never even say hello to you, sex in places where you would be arrested if they caught you, daredevil sex, weird sex, sweet and sour and salty sex.

  Sex with Carolyn.

  During training they only jacked you through cages, to get used to it, so you couldn’t physically touch anyone you were jacked with. Most of the jack joints outside the base offered only solitary experiences, but in a few expensive ones, two people could jack together in real time, in private. Sort of like the motels in Rock City, though they advertised environmentos sanitos rather than clean sheets, and charged by the minute rather than by the hour.

  We asked around and went to Cielito Lindo, a place that did look clean. The women who hovered around the entrance, so-called jills, didn’t molest us, but stared deeply at me, and some at Carolyn: if you think it’s good with an amateur, come back and try it again with a pro.

  The mamacita in charge was fat and jolly, and told us the rules: Timer starts the second you close the door, and stops when you come back to the desk and pick up your credit card. Lie there and murmur sweet nothings; they cost the same as sweet somethings.

  I asked her whether people ever burst out of the room stark naked and sprint for the credit card. “I have them arrested for indecent exposure,” she said, “unless I’m extremely entertained.” I decided not to press my luck.

  The room was small and clean and smelled heavily of jasmine. There was nothing in it but a large bed with a pile of pillows. The sheet felt like freshly starched cotton, but was dispensed by a practical and unromantic roller.

  We’d had sex a couple of hours earlier, so it wouldn’t be over immediately, but we were both more than ready when we shucked our clothes and jacked and fell into bed. I kissed and tasted her all over, feeling our mutual tongue on the skin we shared. When we tasted me inside her, I shared her orgasm, but kept just enough “I” not to ejaculate.

  She straddled me and slid back and forth once, and I snapped into her with the springy force of a horny teenager. She held my hips still, telling me wordlessly not to thrust, and for a few moments we merged completely, as I flowed into her and she into me, until neither of us could stand it, and we bucked so hard, we rolled off the bed and lay there gasping.

  “Nice carpet,” she said while we felt our skin against the rough pile. One of us had bruised a hip in the fall. When we unjacked, I realized it was hers.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Clumsy.” She stroked my retreating dick.

  “That musta been at least ten seconds,” she said huskily. “Why don’t you put on some pants and go get your card.”

  We went to the Cielito Lindo three more times, and once tried Falling In Love, where you made love, or had sex, during an endless fall from an airplane, and floated gently to earth afterwards. But then we did have to literally get back down to earth, Carolyn to her studies and me to my measurements and equations.

  Parting was like losing a limb, or part of your mind, but knowing you’d be whole again in three weeks.

  I tried to explain it to Blaze, the first day I was back. We were having coffee in a quiet corner of the Student Center.

  “You know what it sounds like,” she said, “and I’m just being an old mother hen here ... but it’s like you had an intense summer romance, rendered even more intense by the pressure of the military environment, and then the jacking squared it, and then making love while you were jacked cubed it. But you can square x and cube x, and it’s still x.”

  “Still just an infatuation.”

  She nodded. “You really think it will last forever, though.”

  “As much of forever as we get.”

  She sipped her coffee, still nodding. “The Siamese twin aspect
. That’s a little creepy.”

  I laughed. “It is. It’s really impossible to explain in words.”

  She stared at me in a funny way. “Wish I could try it. I’m just jealous.” Maybe I blushed. “Not of Carolyn, silly. Of you both, of the whole experience.”

  Blaze would lose her grant and her job if she got jacked. Most contracts for intellectual jobs had no-jacking clauses, for obvious reasons; I was protected because my military jack wasn’t voluntary. The operation for jacking wasn’t even legal in the States for civilians, though hundreds crossed the border every day to have it done.

  I had tremendous respect for Blaze, and wanted so much for her to understand. But I suppose it was like a deeply religious person trying to explain her ecstasy to someone like me, before. Samantha was like that, and I understood her instantly, below the level of words, the moment we jacked together. As she understood me, and forgave my unbelief.

  Blaze did have legitimate professional concerns, because I was far from being an ideal coworker. I couldn’t concentrate well. At some level, I was never not thinking about Carolyn, and at another level it had to show. I couldn’t look at a calendar without counting the days until I gave up my freedom again.

  “Why don’t you take the weekend off and go to Georgia?” Blaze said on Thursday morning. “Can’t you soldierboys fly for free?”

  I was a mechanic, and the machine was a soldierboy, but it was a mistake often made. “I was planning to work over the weekend, catch up.”

  She laughed. “Why don’t you catch up with Carolyn instead? The Jupiter Project will lurch along somehow without you.”

  I wasn’t happy about being so transparent, but couldn’t pass it up. I called Carolyn, and she was ecstatic. Her roommate agreed to get lost for a few days, and I got booked on a transport headed for Macon Friday afternoon.

  It turned out strange. Of course, there was no place to jack in Macon, and we were back to basics. We had the unspoken assumption that that would be enough, but in fact, it wasn’t. I wasn’t impotent, exactly, and she wasn’t unreceptive, exactly. But early Saturday morning we took a bus to Atlanta and got a cheap room a couple of blocks from the jack joints outside Fort McPherson.

  The Stars and Stripes Forever was the cheapest place, no frills, which was fine with both of us. Sunday morning, though, we counted our pennies and splurged on Private Space, which gave the illusion of zero gravity, surrounded by whirling galaxies, and that was extraordinary.

  We did talk a little bit about it. It was unsettling, but we agreed it was in large measure the fact that jacking was still new to us. We parted very much in love, but a little shaken by the contrast between the normal and enhanced states.

  Making love in her apartment, we’d both been fantasizing like mad about the previous week.

  * * * *

  In a couple of weeks, we were on our first independent combat mission.

  Bravo Platoon was H&I, a Harassment and Interdiction unit. So our main job was to go in there and screw things up for the enemy. Confusion rather than killing.

  In this case, our assignment was a little focused chaos. The Ngumi had put together a command center in a remote valley in Costa Rica, laboriously carrying in equipment and munitions by night, by hand. No heat signature visible from above the tree canopy. They didn’t know yet that we had seeded the entire countryside with microscopic olfactory devices whose simple job was to ping their location when a sweating human walked by. So we knew exactly where the enemy was and what trails they had taken.

  We stayed off those trails. If you’re careful and slow, you can move the heavy soldierboy through pretty thick brush without a sound. I guided the ten of us up both sides of the main trail, averaging about one mile per hour. Twice, their patrols tiptoed right through our platoon without noticing us, our suits set on camo in the dark.

  Arlie got to their perimeter first. She stood quietly a few yards away from a dozing sentry while the rest of us encircled the camp. I was poised to start the attack instantly if one of us was detected, but we all got into place without a hitch.

  I was nominally in charge, but all ten of us were essentially wired in parallel. At my thought, we all attacked at once.

  No weapons at first but light and sound: ten lights much brighter than the sun; ten deafening speakers shrieking a dissonant chord. Then a billow of gas from ten directions.

  They were out of their tents firing wildly, but almost all took one breath of KO gas and fell unconscious. Two had been able to don gas masks. Mel took one and I took the other. Knocked away his rifle and tapped him on the chest, which flung him to the ground. I pulled off his gas mask and tossed it away, and moved with the others to the central objective, a tetrahedral mini-fort of some bulletproof plastic. They’d evidently brought it up piecemeal and glued it together.

  Our forces had encountered them in the African desert (invisible to radar and tough on flyboys), but this was the first one we knew of in Costa Rica. They fired 155 mm explosive armor-piercing shells, which could disable a soldierboy, but the barrel was external. It spun around fast, but we could anticipate it and duck. They were firing dumb shells, fortunately.

  We could just keep ducking and dodging until he ran out of ammunition, but he was firing all over the place, and liable to kill some of his own people, or civilian mules. So Carolyn and I fried two corners of the thing with lasers, reaiming several times a second as we evaded its fire, which finally heated up the inside and filled it with burning-plastic fumes. A door popped open and two people spilled out, coughing. We KO’ed them, too, and then gathered up all the sleeping bodies and stacked them. Then we lasered a clearing out of the forest to use as a landing zone and called for a chopper to come get them.

  From turning on the lights to loading the “captives” aboard the chopper, it was about twelve minutes. No casualties.

  Mel was not able to hide his resentment at that. Thanks...we’re still virgins. He apologized, but it hung in the air.

  I would have called it a textbook-perfect operation, but while we were waiting for pickup, we got the word from the officers’ review board, which had been hooked up with us for evaluation. Three out of the seven thought we should have destroyed the mini-fort and its two occupants immediately, before they could harm a soldierboy or bystanders.

  Okay, I thought, you come down and kill them. While the soldierboys were on the chopper back, and we were unjacked in the relative privacy of the situation room, we chewed that over. Seven of the platoon agreed with me, predictably; all but Mel and Sara. The disagreement was mild, though; they said they would have done it differently, but it was my call. They didn’t think much of the long-distance quarterbacking.

  Of course, the officers had really been no further from the action than we were.

  They gave us Sunday afternoon off, and I managed to get an advance in pay (borrowing against it, actually; paying the government 10 percent interest) so we could go downtown and jack.

  It was called the Hotel de Dream. An uninhabited desert island this time, and I paid ahead for thirty minutes, so after we made love in the low morning sun, we swam in the warm water for a few minutes, and then sat and held each other while the gentle surf rolled over us. It was jarring when the time ran out suddenly and we were in that hard plain bed, hardly even touching.

  No money for a hotel room. We had hot dogs for dinner and a couple of beers, and then walked back to the base and our separate beds.

  * * * *

  Blaze was amused but shook her head. “You’re in for four years, ten days at a time?”

  “Yeah. I see what you mean.” We were alone at the coffee place, mid-morning.

  “By the time you get out, you’ll owe the army a million dollars. At ten percent interest.”

  I could just shrug, and I guess smile sheepishly.

  “You know it’s like addictive behavior. If the army had gotten you hooked on DDs, we’d be down there with a brace of lawyers, getting you pulled from service and into detox. But they’v
e got you hooked on love!”

  “Come on . . .”

  “Try to be objective about it. I know Carolyn’s a nice girl and so forth—”

  “Watch out, Blaze.”

  “Listen to me for just one minute, okay?” She took out her notebook and clicked a couple of times. “Do you know what your brain chemistry looks like when you go down to that Motel de Dream?”

  “Hotel. Pretty strange, I suppose.”

  “Not strange at all. It’s a seething stew of oxytocin, serotonin, and endogenous opioids. Your vasopressin receptors are wide open. You would be totally juiced even if Carolyn was a gerbil!”

  I could feel myself almost grinning. “Nice job of objectifying it. But if you haven’t been there, you just don’t know. It really is love.”

  “Okay. So do me a favor. Do it with one of the other women. Watch yourself fall in love with her.”