“We insert a microchip in the top of the spinal column,” the colonel said, reaching over to touch my neck just below my hairline. I flinched as if his fingers were icy cold. “The chip is programmed with a number of algorithms. If we want the PMC to walk, the chip activates the leg muscles in the correct sequence to lift one foot and put it in front of the other. If we want them to pick up a crate, the chip has a subroutine for that. This generation of chip has some fifty basic programs, any of which can be chosen by the controller.”
The controller—meaning anyone, like the sergeant I’d seen at the FOB—had the right equipment to send the right signals to those chips. The controller could give a general order, and the PMCs would act as a group, or he could choose a certain PMC, identified by serial number, and give it specific commands.
“And this is cheaper than robots?” I asked.
The colonel favored me with one of his chilly smiles. “The chips are made in China for under ten dollars. They can be inserted without surgical equipment: All it takes is a syringe and a strong, wide-bore needle. The Mylar for the wrappers costs us pennies for the square yard. Ms. Flores, it will cost us more to feed and house you on this trip than it did to activate my new troops.”
He looked especially proud of that fact.
“But they’re not . . . intelligent on their own. They can’t make decisions for themselves,” I said. “They can’t be the equivalent of real troops.”
“Let’s find out together, shall we?” He helped me up into the back of the truck. In a few minutes we were rolling deep into disputed territory.
We passed through scattered villages as the truck bumped and bounced over smoothed-out stretches of desert that could barely be called roads. The Muzhiks came out of their houses to watch us pass by, shepherds and store owners in wool vests despite the heat, old women draped from head to toe in modest garments that looked dusty and uncomfortable, even first thing in the morning. They were Asian Muslims, almost uniformly belonging to a very old, very quiet Sufi sect, though their genes had been passed down from Genghis Khan and his many wives. They did not wave or smile. They stared at the yellow men in the truck and hurried back to their business.
Muzhikistan is a very old country and one of the poorest on Earth. The people there have nothing to offer the world that it can’t get more cheaply or more efficiently somewhere else. The only thing even vaguely important about the country is that if you want to get oil from Russia down to Baghdad, or vice versa, you have to go through Muzhikistan. Russia and the United States had joined forces in the early 2010s to build a super-high-tech and strategically vital pipeline that managed to cut Muzhikistan in half.
And of course some of the locals had taken exception to that.
They claimed that the pipeline infringed on ancestral nomadic herding grounds that had been passed down from father to son since before the fall of the Roman Empire. They claimed that the foreign workers who came in to install and then service the pipeline were stealing Muzhiki jobs, corrupting Muzhiki youth with their outsider culture, and wrecking the Muzhiki environment with spills and industrial waste products. In all of these things they were 100 percent correct. The Muzhikis took their case to the UN. The Western world, which these days doesn’t even bother pretending we’re here for anything but the oil, gave a collective shrug.
So some Muzhikis—the young, the bored, the inevitable dead-enders—started blowing up sections of pipeline and killing oil workers at lonely, isolated maintenance stations. That’s when the army came in.
It was police work that was needed. But in the last fifteen years, the army has gotten very good at a certain kind of brutal police work. I’d seen it in Syria, in Palestine, in Afghanistan (against the Taliban, the anti-Taliban militias, and the resurgent Taliban in 2014, when I had to wear a burka in public or risk being picked off by snipers). It worked. A small group of soldiers would identify the village where a suspected terrorist lived. They would go door-to-door, demanding to know where the perp was hiding. Some old men would get beaten up. A lot of women would run into the street screaming. And then a soldier from Missouri wearing a hundred thousand dollars worth of body armor and electronics would haul a shriveled old farmer in a tattered robe out of a spider hole, and nobody would ever see the old guy again.
While no one was watching me, I took the tube of sunscreen out of my bag and smeared the thick goo all over my cheeks and throat. No one noticed that it was my first application of the day. The living men around me were in their zone, ready for a confrontation. The PMCs couldn’t see what I was doing.
When our truck pulled into the main square of a village about seventy kilometers from the FOB, I knew what to expect. Of course, I wasn’t prepared for how the new soldiers—the PMCs—would be different.
The colonel raised one hand in the air, and the sergeant controlling the PMCs started pressing buttons. In perfect synchrony the yellow suits clambered up from where they’d been sitting totally motionless for the whole ride and leaped down into the dusty square. They brushed past me one after the other, and I had a chance to realize they didn’t smell like anything but plastic before they were deployed.
The colonel stood up on the roof of the truck’s cab with a bullhorn and a poster-sized photograph of a kid with crazy eyes. It didn’t look like a class picture or a formal portrait—more like a grainy blowup of a satellite photo, maybe taken while the kid was enrolled in a terrorist training camp over in Waziristan. The colonel started shouting through the bullhorn in the local dialect of Arabic. I understood maybe one word in five, but I had heard such announcements often enough before: “We are looking for this person. He is wanted for insurgency and is an enemy of all freedom-loving people. If he is surrendered immediately we will leave you in peace. You have five minutes to comply.”
Except this time they didn’t get the five minutes. That had always been a problem, that waiting period: In five minutes a trained insurgent could be halfway across town, halfway up into the hills that loomed over the village like the sheltering arms of Allah Himself. Or he could be arming himself, his family, his neighbors—getting ready for a draw down with the U.S. military.
This time he wasn’t given the chance. The sergeant bent over his controller and tapped a few keys, pulled a few trigger buttons. And the PMCs went to work.
They didn’t canvass the village, knocking on doors, asking questions. They couldn’t talk, and I guess maybe knocking wasn’t one of their fifty programmed behaviors. They didn’t move through the village like police at all. They dismantled it.
The little houses were made out of corrugated tin or of wood so rare and so old and dry it snapped when they pulled at it. Some of the houses were little more than tents with one cinder-block wall, and those came down with almost comical ease.
The women of the village started screaming on cue. Old men and young boys came rushing out of their collapsing homes, shouting in Arabic and grabbing up stones to throw or brandishing long traditional knives. It was enough to make me sick—although I did notice one thing in favor of the colonel’s new troops. They weren’t killing anyone. They weren’t beating anybody who showed a sign of resistance, they weren’t humiliating people in their own homes. They weren’t even armed, because apparently shooting a gun was not one of their fifty programmed actions.
They were destroying with their bare hands everything the Muzhiki owned, and they could not be stopped.
It was enough to get the reaction the colonel wanted. There was a sudden horrible wail from a woman just old enough to be the wanted man’s mother. And then the target of the raid, the guy from the poster, came rushing out of where he’d been hidden behind some sheep in a makeshift pen. He was armed, as was to be expected, with an AK-47 assault rifle, and he came out shooting.
I ducked reflexively as the bullets chattered out of the gun’s barrel, tearing into the yellow-covered flesh of one of the PMCs. The dead soldier stopped what he had been doing—which was pulling down the roof of a granary shed—an
d turned to face his attacker. The insurgent fired again and again into the yellow target before him, and suddenly I understood why the army had chosen that preposterous color for the PMCs’ uniforms.
It didn’t matter if they got shot. In fact, it was better if they got shot, because then somebody in a camouflage uniform, somebody living, wouldn’t.
The PMC didn’t fall down. It staggered a little as each bullet tore into its body. It didn’t move to counterattack or raise its arms to shield its face. The insurgent kept shooting, even as the expression on his face went from furious hatred to total incomprehension to blank shock. Eventually his weapon ran dry.
Then the PMCs moved in, crowding him with their bodies. Jumping on top of him, holding him down with their . . . uh . . . dead weight. The insurgent tried to free the bayonet from the end of his rifle and stab at his subduers, but they didn’t care if they got stabbed, any more than they cared about being shot. Eventually they disarmed him and dragged him back to the truck. He was pushed, bleeding a little but not seriously injured, up into the flatbed, where he stared at me with mad eyes. He kept licking his lips as if his mouth had gone bone dry. The colonel had a set of plastic restraints ready and secured him without any further fuss.
The PMCs filed back onto the truck without so much as waving good-bye to the people they’d so effectively terrorized. We were back on the road before the dust had even begun to settle.
We were out on mission for ten days, during which time I saw the PMCs take apart half a dozen villages. Every time we actually caught an insurgent, he was whisked away in a helicopter before I had a chance to talk to him, and we would move on to the next destination before I knew we were done. At the end of the day the truck would take us to some dry riverbed or natural cave, where we would bunk for the night—the sergeant and a couple of corporals in one tent, the colonel and I sleeping in another. The PMCs didn’t need shelter, even when a dust storm kept us pinned down for most of one day. At a button-press from their controller, they would sit down with their heads between their knees and just . . . go limp. Occasionally one of them would fall over, but no one bothered to prop it back up again.
They didn’t eat. They could be woken up at any time of day or night as needed. They didn’t get bored; they didn’t trade scuttlebutt; they didn’t need to dig latrines every time they dug in at a new position. And they required very little in the way of medical attention.
That was what the corporals were for. They had a big crate mounted on the side of the truck, which was full of patch kits and a big heat laminator they used to fix holes in the IPWs. They would cut off a length of yellow Mylar from a big roll and then lay it in place over any cuts or tears in the wrappers. Then using what were for all intents and purposes extremely powerful hair dryers, they fused the patches into the PMC’s wrapper to repair the airtight seal. The Mylar would get hot enough to bubble and give off fumes, so the corporals wore surgical masks when they worked, but the PMCs never complained or even flinched.
“What happens,” I asked the colonel one night while we were watching this process, “if one of them breaks a leg or gets hit by a mortar round or—”
“If they fall below a certain threshold of functionality, we remove them from service.”
“What does that entail?” I asked. “Last rites? A military funeral?”
“They’ve already had those honors. We give them command number fifty, the last one they’ll ever perform. They dig a grave for themselves and then climb in and fill it back up. What are you doing with that sunscreen?” he asked suddenly.
I had been rubbing it into my forehead and eyelids. I stopped and had to think of an appropriate lie. It was well after dark, and even the moon was a bare sliver of white in the sky. “It’s got moisturizers in it,” I said as calmly as I could. “And my skin gets pretty dry and flaky in this desert air.”
He looked a lot more suspicious than I liked, so I changed the subject quickly.
“So how do you think the public is going to react when people read my report?” I asked.
The colonel rubbed at his face for a moment. It had been a long deployment for someone who really ought to have been working a desk job. “They’ll probably be up in arms for a while,” he sighed, “until they start seeing the results. Imagine if we could replace all of our land forces with PMCs. Imagine what that would mean: No more casualties; the defense budget could be cut in half overnight. The thing your kind don’t appreciate—” he said, but I had to stop him.
“ ‘My kind’? What’s that supposed to mean?”
He gave me a cold stare. “Reporters.” He pulled a crate over by the front of our tent and sat down on it. He did not offer me one. “The thing you can’t seem to understand is that we don’t want to be doing this. We don’t want to be doing any of this.” He waved expansively, taking in the rocks around us, the hills off to our left, all of Muzhikistan. “We would like very much to just go home. Soldiers don’t like being shot at. Officers don’t like filling up body bags. Nobody likes paying for us to do this. If we could end war as we know it, don’t you think everyone would agree it’s worth getting over a little squeamishness?”
“Some people will say you’re desecrating the dead,” I told him. “No matter how cheap your secret weapon is. Anyway—if we replace all our ground troops with dead people, won’t you be out of a job?”
I could see his teeth gleam even in the darkness. “What job? You’ve already sabotaged my career.”
It was true, but I didn’t think gloating would be useful, and I couldn’t bring myself to sympathize. “Listen, I think I’ll turn in for the night.”
Another nonspecific wave. He didn’t seem to care much what I did, as long as I stayed out of trouble.
Inside the tent I took out my tube of sunblock and, with the cap on, gave it a good squeeze. It was mostly empty now, but I could feel the thickness of the concealed circuitry in the bottom of the tube. It vibrated silently in my hand, telling me it was working properly.
It wasn’t, of course, sunscreen in the tube. Instead it was a very special goop designed by a Dutch television network—a kind of liquid camera. Each tiny droplet of the cream was a photosensitive cell, a charged bubble that held a positive charge when it was smeared on but which flipped over to a negative charge when it was exposed to light. The droplets on their own were only capable of recording a single pixel worth of information, but when you spread enough of them on any given surface, they added up. The circuitry hidden in the tube could read the charge states of the bubbles and build a coherent picture out of what they were seeing—a black-and-white image with a resolution in the low megapixels. The pictures were then stored in solid-state memory for download at any wireless node. Everything I’d seen on our tour of the Muzhikistan countryside was being recorded in that tube—and would be until I ran out of goo.
I had promised the colonel I wouldn’t bring any cameras. Instead I’d brought a couple million of them. I was hardly the first journalist, though, to tell a little lie to get to a big truth.
It looked like I had one more day’s worth of cream left, which should have been more than enough. We were supposed to be heading back to the FOB the next morning, and I already had enough footage to shock the world.
I wasn’t counting on the counter-counterinsurgency.
The colonel didn’t wake me in the night to let me know the PMCs had been sent out on assignment. Even when I woke on my own and found them gone from the camp, he refused to tell me where they’d gone or why. “We received some troubling intelligence last night,” was all he would say, “so I sent them to investigate.”
“You promised me full access,” I said.
“No. If there was any chance of you coming to harm, I said I would send you back to base immediately. That’s what I’m doing now.”
“Danger? What kind of danger?”
But clearly we’d moved beyond the realm of things I needed to know. He refused to say another word; instead, he gave one of the corporals
orders to call for my immediate evacuation.
I was still waiting for the chopper that would take me back to base when the PMCs started marching back into our camp. Apparently the colonel hadn’t been lying about the danger. There were only forty-one of them—nine must have been damaged to the point where they couldn’t even crawl home—and twelve of the ones that made it back were so badly hurt they had to be given command fifty, the order to bury themselves for good. Their arms hung loose inside their IPWs. Their heads swayed limply on crooked necks. Some of their IPWs were torn open, and I got my first glimpse of what a six-month-old dead body looks like: Imagine a mummy with its wrappings torn off. Their eyes were sewn shut, their faces mummified, lips desiccated and drawn back over yellow, protruding teeth. I’d seen dead bodies before, but still I was shocked, perhaps because I’d gotten so used to the sanitized, cheery yellow version of their faces.
I also got to smell them for the first time. The IPWs had been hermetically sealed for a reason that had nothing to do with keeping bugs out. I’d been covering war zones long enough that I knew the smell of death, of course—that curiously foul stench you can’t really describe in words. I had expected that the rankness of a torn-open PMC would be unbearable, toxic. Actually, this wasn’t so bad. But it was different. The PMCs smelled musty. Ancient. Like something pulled out of a pyramid that hadn’t been mummified properly.
The colonel took one look at them and started bellowing orders. “Get these things ready to go back out. We’re not letting them win this one. You—” he shouted at the sergeant, “find out what the satellites are saying. I need intel, intel, intel!”
I’ve been in triage centers when a squad of injured soldiers comes in, and it’s a horror show. Blood everywhere, limbs hanging by scraps of skin, soldiers who are badly disfigured holding on against the pain to make sure their less-fortunate buddies don’t die before they arrive. This was nothing like that. The PMCs didn’t scream, and they didn’t smell like shit and blood. But there was a similar level of tense energy in the air, a familiar sense of the wrongness of it. The PMCs were nearly invulnerable; the insurgents we’d captured hadn’t so much as slowed them down. So what the hell had happened last night?
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