BY JS MORIN
What had appeared to be a modest proving-ground facility nestled against the Sierra Nevada Mountains turned out to be anything but. Flanked by a pair of US Army soldiers, Commander Brent “Skip” Harrison limped up to the security station and stepped into a glass booth like one of the old-fashioned airport screeners. Beams of green light swept over him, top to bottom and back again. On the far side, a technical sergeant tapped away at a workstation.
“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 anti-matter 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 autonomous 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 arms, 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 else was 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 com 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?”
“Yes sir, just a regular O-3.” She had a clipboard under one arm, and bent to retrieve a paper grocery bag that clinked with a familiar glass chime as she lifted it. “I’m here to check in on you, but I came with a peace offering.”
“Peace offering?” Skip asked, stepping aside to let Captain Walsh in and keep the desert heat out. “Gus think he pissed me off or something? Sorry, I mean Colonel Cliffton.”
She smiled and set the grocery bag on the kitchenette table. “Sometimes I forget that Dr. Cliffton has a rank. He rarely puts on a proper uniform. He’s just… well, he’s Dr. Cliffton.”
Skip maneuvered around and peered into the bag on the table. Inside were a wine bottle, a six-pack of beer he couldn’t identify by brand from a top-down view, some nachos, and a plastic tub of pork rinds.
“Eclectic mix.”
“Dr. Cliffton didn’t know if you’d developed sophisticated tastes since Kabul. The wine was…” she cleared her throat and did a fair impression of Gus. “In case you’d gone all Washington.”
“Wine’s good for dinner parties. I hate dinner parties.”
Captain Walsh slipped up beside him and rested a hand on his lower back as she reached into the bag. “Fine. Hope you don’t mind Coors. It’s the best we’ve got at the PX.”
Skip cleared his throat. “So, you drew the short straw, coming out to placate me?”
“Short straw? I had to pull rank to be the one to come check you out tonight.” Her other hand slipped inside Skip’s open shirt and ran along the space where he used to have abs before middle age caught up with him.
For the first time since her arrival, he allowed himself to view the captain as a woman, not a fellow officer from another branch. She was nearly his height, with her combat boots and his bare feet leveling the playing field. Her sandy blonde hair was pinned into a bun at the back of her neck. The natural bagginess of her uniform couldn’t completely disguise her trim figure. And those blue eyes stared right back when he looked into them. She bit her lip.
“Captain, I—”
“You can call me Fiona.”
“Captain, I’m not sure this is appropriate.” Skip held up his left hand, interposing his wedding ring like a Spartan shield wall. It was the first time he could remember being grateful that it was his right arm he’d lost. “I’m happily married.”
She held up a hand with a ring of pale skin where a wedding ring had once been. “I am, too. Mine’s back in Arlington, making a daily commute to the Pentagon. But I’m here for a post-test psych eval, and my professional opinion is that you’ve had a stressful day. I’d be derelict in my duties if I didn’t stay until I was certain you were… de-stressed”
Skip retreated a pace, running a self-conscious hand over his shaved head. “I’m a mess. I mean, I’m fine. Yeah, sure, it’s been a long day. But I’m tired. I’m… I smell funny. I’m bald as a—”
“It looks good on you. Listen, Commander—can I call you Brent?”
“Skip’s fine.” He should have told her to stick to Commander Harrison. He knew as soon as the words escaped his lips.
“Skip, I can only imagine what life’s been like for you on the outside. Hospital gowns instead of uniforms. Getting treated like a civilian. Must have been hell. But right here, right now, you’re a hero, doing work no one else can do. And right here, right now, it’s just you, me, and this cozy little apartment where I promise you, no one will bother us until 0600 tomorrow.” As she spoke, Fiona slowly undid the buttons on her uniform shirt. She was still wearing a khaki teeshirt underneath, but it was pulled tight against her skin and dark at the collar with sweat.
“This is against regulations.” Lame excuse. Regulations hadn’t stopped fraternizing in the history of organized militaries.
Fiona dropped her shirt to the floor and slid her hands under Skip’s. “Everyone here values your emotional health. I have permission from General Kogane to be here. And as for the outside world, well… what happens in secret military base stays in secret military base.” She slipped Skip’s shirt off his shoulders and pressed herself against him.
But the shirt never hit the floor. Catching the garment around his wrists, Skip hobbled backward, stumbling against the wall as he shrugged back into some semblance of being in uniform. “At ease, Captain Walsh. Stand down.” Mental images of Maddie flashed before his eyes. Her smile on their wedding day. The exhausted euphoria holding Grant for the first time. Their second honeymoon in Fiji.
Captain Walsh complied without a hint of protest, scooping up her own uniform top and retrieving the clipboard he had forgotten she had even brought with her. “I think that will conclude my psych eval for the post interface check. Thank you for your cooperation, Commander Harrison.”
“Wait. This was all a test?” What kind of place was this? Wasn’t it enough that they’d put him through the ringer mentally, running signals through parts of his brain he barely knew existed? Now they wanted to dangle bait in front of him to see if he’d take it?
“Yes and no. I’m here to evaluate your mental state after spending the day plugged into an experimental computer. You’re aware, alert, in full possession of your mental faculties, and behaving within the bounds of your latest psych eval we acquired from the navy.” She rattled off her reply as she buttoned up her uniform—an actress backstage after playing her role.
“And if I’d gone along?”
“I’d have known you were in a compromised mental state. I really am a trained army psychologist, even though we play with expanded ethical standards this side of top secret. We both know it wasn’t going to happen. That wife of yours is a lucky woman.”
With a salute, Captain Walsh took her leave. Skip headed right back to the shower to see how cold the water could get in this desert.
• • •
In the morning, Skip once more found himself jabbed, clamped, probed, and immersed in the pod. While not a bit of it was pleasant, the prospect of experiencing the mech in the field was more than enough to keep him focused through the process, and knowing what was involved kept his nerves from fraying. When his natural vision blinked out to be replaced by the computer feed from the Beowulf, he felt a thrill of ecstasy.
He was sixty feet tall and indestructible. And today, Gus promised Skip that he’d be allowed to take the Beowulf through its paces.
“So, Doctor Cliffton, you gonna let this baby off its leash for me?” High tension cables anchored the Beowulf to the walls and ceiling of the cavern. He could twist a few degrees, but the force feedback made him feel the resistance of lines that were stronger than the mechanical muscles of the vehicle.
“Just a few diagnostics to complete. Your vitals are looking better today. Hope you got a good night’s sleep. Today isn’t going to be the cakewalk that yesterday was.”
Cakewalk was one word for it. Tedium turned out to be more like it. Raise the left arm—good. Lower the left arm—good. Now swivel the head—excellent. It was like dog training. Skip had a ten-year-old golden retriever named Daisy who could follow directions like that, and she had never been through flight school.
“All right, Commander. We’re cutting power umbilicals. You’ll be switching over to internal battery power.”
“How long does the battery power last?”
“Longer than you. Don’t worry about it. Once you’re on internal power, you’ll have a readout for battery life.”
Army personnel swarmed the Beowulf on lifts and extendable catwalks. Images of them popped up on sub-displays as Skip directed the mech’s external cameras. They were disconnecting the tethers. Soon he’d be free to operate unfettered. Once the last of the hookups was severed, there would be nothing but Skip to direct the vehicle. It took them under five minutes. As the last of the workers retreated, he flexed his mechanical muscles. “Ready to go. What’s first on the agenda?”
The ground rumbled. Skip looked up into the control booth. Gus was standing there with his arms crossed and a smug grin. Whatever was going on, Gus knew, so Skip just waited to see what his latest surprise was. It was a doozy.
Skip began to sink. What he’d believed to be a solid floor beneath his feet was, in fact, an elevator platform, and it was lowering him farther below ground. Was there a test course down there? As the platform lowered, he ran through some deep knee bends and abdominal twists, exercises he couldn’t have performed while tethered. The twists were mildly disorienting as they swiveled his camera view of his surroundings; it would take some getting used to the lack of direct equilibrium feedback in his movements.
The elevator ride was short, just over one mech-height down, and it ended in a long tunnel lit by fluorescent lights along both walls. He hadn’t been sent down here for the view, so Skip took the initiative and started walking. The first few steps were like a nightmare trip down memory lane. He was back in his first few days of post-cybernetic rehab. His mind was fighting old muscle memory that told him one way to walk while the Beowulf refused to respond the way he imagined it should.
But having been through the process once before, Skip knew how to both persevere and adapt. The first ten steps were halting and awkward. If not for the intervention of balance-assist hardware baked into the system, he knew he’d have fallen multiple times. But the next few dozen steps smoothed out, and by the time he was halfway down the tunnel, Skip was trudging along in rhythm like a hiker caught in deep snow.
“This why I got the call on this project instead of someone with a special ops background? I already knew the learning process?”
“It was a consideration. But the truth is, we’ve found that a pilot’s training maps better to the controls than experience in power armor. Tactics and maneuvers are easier to teach than the sort of spatial awareness and cockpit presence you flyboys learn.”
“What’s at the end of this tunnel?”
“A door.”
So Gus wanted it to be yet another surprise. What was it with top-secret sorts? Did they not get enough excitement in their sequestered little lives? Or was this because he and Gus were old friends? No, Skip decided. This was yet another in an ever increasing list of tests. They wanted to keep him guessing, off-balance, and reacting. He had to keep reminding himself that the Beowulf was only one part of the project; he was the other. And if this was an uneven split, he would have to guess that mimicking a human brain was the harder half. After all, what was he driving but an oversized suit of power armor with a new control scheme?
The tunnel was distinctly beginning to slope uphill. He didn’t need Gus to tell him that he was going to come out somewhere above ground, even if the Beowulf hadn’t had an altimeter. The hangar was already an impressive feat of engineering. Duplicating it on a scale that would allow the Beowulf to run through its paces would have been impractical. His guess was proved right when sunlight peeked around the outline of the door as it swung outward.
Skip waited.
He was a robotic step from freedom, from open spaces and sunny skies. But the meter-thick slab of steel was opening at a crawl. “Mind if I give this thing a push?”
“By all means. Give me a second to disengage the motor and it’s all yours.”
A low-gear diesel grumble that Skip been ignoring as background noise suddenly ceased. He took that last step forward and reached out with the mech’s right hand. He could feel the weight resisting his efforts, but there was no exertion on his part. The door swung out of the way, and Skip looked up into a clear blue sky. A shimmer in the air caught his eye. “We under some kind of force field?”
Gus laughed over the radio, and in the background Skip could hear a chorus joining him. “You’re in the most advanced thing we’ve got. J-PAC would kill to get their hands on the Beowulf. But we’re not building Hollywood magic here. You’re seeing a scatter field, in case anyone’s getting nosy on satellite.”
“Understood.”
Skip was in another valley in the Sierra Nevadas. Mountains hemmed him in on all sides. Scattered among the rocks and scraggly desert plants were targets of various sorts. There were modular general-purpose tents arranged in a mock-up of a military base. Along one ridge line there were giant red-and-white bullseyes, one of which was being lowered into position by helicopter. Farther down the valley, there was a small cinderblock village.
“Commander, you’re going to need to unlock fire control. Look to the lower left for a manual input console. Code is eight-seven-alpha-charlie-four-four-zulu-one-November.”
Glancing at the manual input console brought it to the fore of Skip’s field of vision. Of course, the “manual” part was a stretch. As Skip focused his attention on each digit and letter in turn, the system accepted that as his selection. As soon as he finished, a whole bevy of new options crowded the heads-up display. Even more strange, he could feel the weapons almost as if they were extra finger or toes. “Whoa.”
“I’ll take that to mean you have access. Now, we’re going to dial back the display resolution. You’re going to be getting a lot of unfamiliar neural feedback, and we don’t want you getting overwhelmed.”
“I thought this project was focusing on signal security. Why can you still change my interface remotely?”
“This is a prototype. The production units will have safeguards like this built in. But until then, we can’t risk you getting into trouble and not being able to adjust the settings yourself. Now, your right arm is fitted with a .50 caliber machine gun. Take aim at the tent city on your two-o’clock and open fire.”
Skip took several steps and adjusted his feet into a shooting stance. “Seems a little lightweight for a weapon this size.”
“It’s temporary. We’ve got subcontractors working on an E-M kinetic system to replace the machine gun. For now, the exercise is more important than the firepower. Proceed with target practice.”
Skip lined up a crosshair with one of the tents and just willed the gun to fire. An automated burst riddled the tent with holes from a distance of 300 meters. “Not bad. But when did you army boys start using metric?”
“It wasn’t easy getting it pushed through, but you tell enough generals that this project is more complex than the mission that missed Mars, and they eventually get the idea that we need a single set of units. Hard to build the future while stuck in the past.”
Skip shredded tents until the .50-cal ran out of ammo. It didn’t have the visceral feel of shooting down enemy fighters with the same gun on his F-54, but he was getting quicker with his aim. “What’s next?”
“Think you’ve got the hang of walking around in that thing?” Gus didn’t wait for a reply. “Good, because I want you to run to the mock village.”
“Run? I’m doing OK with walking, but…”
“Walk if you have to. You’ll be doing it more than once. Eventually you’ll pick up the pace.”
The first trip took him twelve minutes. By the tenth time, he had it down to three. He was learning the terrain and where he had the best footing, but more than that, he was flowing more easily from one step to the next. The thinking required was drifting into muscle memory, which was weird to contemplate, since there wasn’t a single muscle of his involved in the process. The prosthetics were foreign, but had become a part of him in a shotgun wedding. The Beowulf was just connected to him by a bunch of wires and probes.
“Great job, Commander. Time for a little fun before we call it a day.”
Skip perked up. There was something of childlike glee in simply piloting a giant robot. For all his complaints about the degrading pod insertion and repetitive drills, he was enjoying himself. Was Gus promising something even better, or was this another bait-and-switch to test him?
“Whatcha got for me? I’m ready.” Ready for a good meal and six or eight showers, but a grand finale could be worth the wait.
“You’re equipped with Dragonfly Mark IV missiles. Take up a position 100 meters from the mock village and pick out a building you don’t like.”
That was an easy task. On his forays back and forth, Skip had developed an adversarial relationship with the nearest structure, a four-story cinderblock apartment building that had marked the end of his timed run. Every time he came up short of his time goal, part of him blamed it for not being just a little closer. Now, it was time for some payback.
The missile controls were a little more complex than the machine gun. He had to arm the missile and confirm a target before it allowed him to fire. But the aiming was all the easier for being integrated into his right arm. For whatever reason, using the left felt less natural and the mental effort was more fatiguing. But between the improved responsiveness of his right arm and the practice he’d gotten with the Beowulf’s targeting system, he had the apartment building in his sights in no time.
With an act of will, he unleashed the Dragonfly. It appeared from a rack buried in Skip’s right forearm and hissed away in a con trail of propellant. The twisting course was visible as it self-corrected mid-flight, and it slammed into the cinderblocks with a concussive blast that sent up a cloud of dust. Skip wanted to crack his knuckles, pound his chest… anything to let loose the surge of power he felt. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a front-row seat for a missile impact in his F-54. Generally, those things hit from kilometers away.
“Ha! Nice shot, Commander. But those buildings take a while to construct. Let’s move on to those bullseyes.”
Skip turned the Beowulf but remained in place. What good were missiles if you ran up to your targets to hit them? His heads-up display was able to mark the bullseyes one by one before firing the first Dragonfly. That first shot obliterated the target in a fiery spray of plywood and desert dust. It made for a better pyrotechnic show than the cinderblocks, but lacked the feel of taking down a real structure. Still, this was a training and data collection exercise, not demolition. He took careful aim and fired again. And again. Halfway through he noticed that his missile count and the number of targets matched perfectly, even accounting for the initial shot on the mock apartment building.
“I notice you guys aren’t expecting any misses.”
“Any intact targets at the end are points off your final score.”
“I’m getting scored on this?”
“No. Not really. Just keep knocking them out. This is it before lunch.”
“Roger that.”
Skip was in a rhythm, but that didn’t mean he allowed himself to get sloppy. He wasn’t just trying to hit the painted targets; he wanted dead-center shots. So every time he aimed, he zoomed in on the target and took careful aim. Often this resulted in him fine tuning the previous marker he’d lined up on the HUD. But while he was aiming in on target seventeen, he noticed a glint from behind the wooden structure.
“Something wrong, Commander? Targeting issue?”
“There’s something moving behind that target. I caught a reflection; might be from a camera or a cell phone.”
“Negative, Commander Harrison. This area is clear and secure. There’s nobody out there but you.”
“I’m at max magnification and I’m not getting enough resolution to confirm. Request increase to maximum visual clarity.”
“Again, negative, Commander. You have two targets remaining, and a green light in the fire zone. Continue firing.”
There it was again. Something moved. It was over two klicks to the target, but with the mech’s digital optics, he saw it as if from across a dimly-lit room. Remembering the manual control console, he glanced down at the lower right of his HUD. “Need to verify. Stand by.”
The menu was comprehensive, but expertly laid out for ease of use. It took Skip no time at all to locate the visual inputs and raise them to the Beowulf’s maximum value. The distant target snapped into crystal focus. He could make out the wood grain, the nail heads, the drips and runs in the slapdash paint job. And more important, he could identify two civilians on the firing range, huddled for cover behind the least safe object in the entire valley: Skip’s next target.
“Bogeys confirmed. We’ve got two unauthorized personnel on the firing range. Request MPs for collection and debriefing.”
“Negative, Commander. We don’t—”
“Did you not hear me? I have visual confirmation. This isn’t a mirage.” What the hell was Gus thinking? That Skip was making this up? That it was a bug in the software making him see what appeared to be a couple college kids—one male, one female—crouched in the shadow of a giant plywood target painted with a bullseye?
“This is a top secret facility. Anyone we send out there will be to eliminate them, not bring them in for questioning.”
Skip’s blood ran cold. “Commander Harrison to base, please repeat. I didn’t copy that last message.”
“Like hell you didn’t, Harrison. This is a live fire exercise. These are spies, whether they realize it or not. These kids get out of here with video, it’ll be all over the internet by suppertime. If we bring them in, it’s just more hands with blood on them when we have to make them disappear. Just take care of it, Skip. It’s only you, me, and a couple of the project crew here with me in the booth that even see them out there. This is the quick way—the secure way.”
“Sorry, Gus. I’m afraid I can’t do that. I refuse to murder two kids because they wandered into your top secret base. Your perimeter security got sloppy, and I don’t think they need to pay for that with their lives. Bring them up on charges… fine. But I won’t fire.”
“That’s an order.”
Skip brought the Beowulf to stand at ease, even though its arms lacked the flexibility to actually meet behind its back. Inside the pod, the meat version of Skip swallowed hard.
“We’ll discuss this when you get back to the hangar. In the meantime, stand down.”
That didn’t sound good. Gus had given up too easily. Immersed in shock-absorbent gel, Skip couldn’t even tell if he was sweating. But while his awareness of his physical self was limited, he still had the feeds from the Beowulf pumped straight into his brain. He heard the helicopter coming before he saw it.
Skip hadn’t been debriefed on the contingent of aircraft at Sand Lion Base. He could tell the engine whine of an F-52 from an F-54 in his sleep, but he didn’t know the prop signature of the AH-95 Kestrel. It wasn’t until it crested the mountains that he realized that they weren’t sending a transport to take the trespassers into custody. That Kestrel was coming to do what he’d refused to. Gus had sent in a cleanup crew.
This was on him. He was either going to stand there like the robot he appeared to be, or step in and do something.
The target was two klicks away, and he was on foot. But his practice running up and down the valley had paid off. He was in between the Kestrel and the two civilians. All he had to do was keep himself interposed and get to them before the cleanup crew could maneuver for a clear line of fire. They wouldn’t dare risk damaging the Beowulf.
What had been an arduous task earlier in the day, Skip now did without thinking. He ran, and instead of his own legs, the legs of the Beowulf pumped beneath him. If he fell, so be it. If he didn’t try, he’d never forgive himself. But he knew the broken terrain of the valley now. He veered aside to dodge a boulder and avoided a crevice by lengthening his stride.
“Commander, what are you doing down there?”
“I already told you, Gus. I’m not killing those civilians, and standing by to do nothing is the same thing.”
The Kestrel was closing rapidly. The Beowulf’s rear-facing cameras allowed Skip a perfect view of it on approach even as he watched where he ran. It was flying chest-high to him, more like an escort than a team racing him to a common goal. Skip imagined that the pilot must have been either confused or conflicted. Could that bird have been patched in on the same frequency as Skip and Gus?
With the Kestrel not busting a rotor to beat him to the target, Skip got there first and stood in front of the cowering civilians. They must have wised up and realized that they were in trouble, because they were taking cover instead of making a run for it across open ground with a military helicopter in the air. What they thought of the fifty-foot walking robot was beyond Skip’s ability to guess.
“You’ve made your point, Commander. Stand down. We’re sending a team in to extract the civilians.”
Skip said nothing. The Beowulf’s shoulders slumped and he let out a sigh of relief that carried over the radio. The rear camera was a smaller image, so he turned to get a view of the strike team in full resolution. He saw the pilot and gunner both salute before turning their bird and bugging out. Skip’s greatest worry in this whole maneuver had been that he might have been forced to fire on friendly forces to defend the civilians.
The wait was another fifteen minutes while a search and recovery team flew in and extracted the two trespassers in handcuffs. He watched them fly over the mountains, wondering what came next.
“You still have two more targets, Commander.”
Of course. The mission. Whatever else buzzed around the periphery, there was nothing that was going to stop a multi-billion-dollar project from moving forward. It also occurred to him that by finishing off the last two targets, Gus ensured that Skip came back into the hangar completely unarmed.
• • •
The techs who extracted Skip from the pod acted like nothing untoward had happened out in the desert. He was unhooked, unplugged, toweled off, and helped into a military-grade bathrobe. His legs wobbled, and someone offered him a shoulder to hang onto. Someone else pressed a fresh cup of coffee into his good hand. They helped him as he headed for the showers.
But as soon as they exited the main hangar, there was a line of officers waiting for him. Time to pay the piper.
Except that it wasn’t. The assembled project team saluted. Even General Kogane and one Doctor Augustus Cliffton, standing at the end of the line. Skip stared in disbelief. Was he hallucinating? A side effect of prolonged exposure to the neural connections? The strike team from the Kestrel was there, too. He hadn’t seen their faces, but they were still wearing the same flight suits. And then he noticed the two “civilian” trespassers, now in uniform and saluting along with the others.
“What’s going on?”
The general and Gus strode down the line of officers blocking his way to the showers. “Damnedest thing I ever saw.” The general shook Skip by the prosthetic hand, heedless of the light coating of slime that the first shower would only mostly remove.
Gus circled around and clapped him on the back. “Skip, hated having to put you through that, but I knew you had it in you.”
“Had what?”
“You stood up to an immoral order,” the general said. “Doctor Cliffton had the legal authority to authorize that shot you wouldn’t take. You could have been locked up for that. Not only did you refuse to kill Corporal Sturges and Sergeant Banks, you put yourself in the line of fire to defend them.”
Gus guided Skip down the row of officers who stood in respectful silence. “Skip, the biggest hurdle this project has to overcome is the fear that turning over control of a weapon system to an autonomous AI is that it’ll turn on us.”
“But I did turn on you.”
General Kogane walked with them, taking up a flanking position on Skip’s left. “Senator Kearny on the Armed Services Committee insisted on this test. He didn’t want any piloting system that could pose a risk to civilian populations—specifically our own. We haven’t had much luck finding pilots, and he’s been making noise about shutting down the project. I’m packing up the data from today’s showing and leaving it on his doorstep like a bag of turd. We’re in business.”
“What the general so eloquently means is that as of today, it’s official. You are the future of America’s AI program. We can teach you any technical skill you need for various combat systems. What we couldn’t replicate is this.” He slapped Skip in the chest, right over his heart.
• • •
This was getting monotonous. Skip had lost track of the number of times the ordinance drones had reloaded his missiles and .50 caliber magazines. Just because this was a mental endurance test didn’t mean it had to be tedious. Helicopters lowered a new set of targets into the valley amid the wreckage of the old. He idly wondered where on base they were getting all the wood, and who they’d pressed into service nailing targets together and painting them. It wasn’t exactly the sort of thing an enlisted soldier would expect when he gets shipped off to a top secret base, Skip imagined.
The voices in his ear kept changing as well. Far be it for Gus to put himself through the arduous task of keeping a headset on this whole time. But at least the rotating crew came with a relaxed familiarity. Most of them didn’t even identify themselves to Skip by rank. There was Kirk, Alphonse, Rick, Sam (short for Samantha, he guessed by her voice), and even Captain Walsh, who he kept trying to avoid calling Fiona. Skip had zero doubt that her offer still stood, and he didn’t want her catching any hint that he might take her up on it. The fact that it sounded like she was second in command to Gus on the project made it all the more crucial to keep things compartmentalized.
Skip wanted to rub his eyes but there was nothing to rub. Scraping the mech’s forearm across the front of the head would only momentarily block a camera or two. His physical arms were restrained and the muscles not receiving impulses from his brain. His eyes were closed behind the protective goggles; or if they were open, he couldn’t tell. All signs of physical fatigue were absent, but he felt them the same way his foot would sometime itch, or his right hand would ache.
“Commander, you’re up.” It was Fiona’s voice on the radio. He couldn’t tell if she was trying to tease him with double entendre or had just been careless.
“How many more sets of these do I have to take down? Can we maybe switch it up with some agility drills? I’m starting to get a little stir-crazy in here. How long has this even been going on?” They’d disabled all timekeeping in the software. He wasn’t supposed to be watching the clock, but he couldn’t help asking.
“Sorry, Commander Harrison. You know we can’t tell you that. Please just proceed. Acquire target one.”
Skip grit his teeth and locked in on the target nearest to his position. The system would have allowed him to designate all eighteen, then rapid-fire knock them all out. But one by one at the direction of the control booth was what they wanted. “Roger that.”
They crawled through the exercise at a snail’s pace. Fiona had him examine each target site after impact before moving on to the next. Near as Skip could tell, it was just busy work. It must have taken half an hour to mow down the full set of targets.
While they waited for the resupply drones, Fiona got chatty. “So, Commander, I hear you’ve got kids. How old are they?”
“What are you talking about? You’ve got my personnel files right there, don’t you? You know I don’t have kids.”
“My mistake. Sorry, Commander.”
“Hey, no problem. You can make it up to me by cutting this marathon short and buying me dinner.” Why he wasn’t starving was a miracle. There must have been some nutrient delivery system somewhere among all the equipment hooked to his body. And he didn’t mind leading Fiona on a little if it got him out of the pod.
“You are married though. What’s your wife’s name?”
“Madeline. Come on, this is all part of my record. What gives?”
“What’s she like? Where’d you honeymoon? How does she smell in the morning?”
This was getting way too personal. There was no way any of this was relevant to piloting a mech or any other military system, and it was none of her goddamn business. Skip told her as much.
“I’ll make you a deal, Skip. You tell me every little thing about you and your wife, I’ll get you out of that pod. How’s that sound? I’ve got the authority on medical grounds, and you’re not scheduled for removal for five more days.”
“Days? You can’t keep me in here for days. I’m climbing the walls in here already.”
“I’m listening. I’ll even clear everyone out of the control booth. Just you and me. Consider it a therapy session. Now… what’s it like when you wake up beside her in the morning?”
Skip hated himself. He hated that Fiona was using him as cheap entertainment. But the thoughts of Madeline were a comfort to him, and he opened up for his own peace of mind. At the start he spoke tentatively, but eventually he was answering Fiona’s questions on the most intimate of topics without giving them a second thought.
An unfamiliar voice came over the radio. It was faint, not something Skip was probably meant to hear. “Doctor Walsh, we have it mapped.”
“What was that? Map of what?”
Fiona’s voice was quieter as well, as if she were holding her headset’s mic away from her mouth. “Excellent. This time let’s delete virtual synapses 32719 through 32745, and the two clusters here where he got sidetracked by sexual thoughts about me. We don’t need an AI that gets distracted so easily.”
“Hey! What are you doing up there?”
“Oh, dammit. He heard me. It’s nothing you need to worry about. You’re a good pilot. We’re just going to make you a better one.”
“By deleting parts of my brain?” Skip was wrung out. He couldn’t process all this. It sounded like they were planning to eliminate parts of his personality. Could all the wires, needles, and neural connectors really do that?
He wasn’t going to take this lying down. Skip ran for the tunnel that led to the hangar. The door was closed, but he had a fresh rack of Dragonfly missiles that said he was getting through. This would be the end of the program for him. Probably get him thrown in a hole somewhere. But they couldn’t take away his memories. Life in a concrete box would be better than living as a hero and not remembering a lifetime with Maddie.
“Captain…” The tech’s voice held a note of rising worry. She’d be a lot more worried if she got in the way of them pulling Skip out of the pod.
Fiona sighed. “I’ve got it. Not like it’s the first time he’s done this…”
The Beowulf stopped in place, no longer responding to his commands. The visual inputs went dark. Then all sensation vanished.
• • •
Gus walked with him from the jeep. On the helipad, the RAH-109 Gyrfalcon waited for him, its engines quiet. It was an easier walk than the inbound trip a month earlier. The trials had been better rehab than the actual clinical treatment Skip had gotten after getting his prosthetics. And to think, all it had taken was a few billion dollars worth of top secret equipment and a team of the military’s best minds. He didn’t even have a noticeable limp anymore.
“You sure you boys can get by without me?” Skip asked with a grin.
Gus shook his prosthetic hand. “We’ll manage. The software version of you is a champ. Hardly know it wasn’t the real Skip Harrison.”
Skip gave a melodramatic shiver. “Kinda glad I can’t tell Maddie about all this. Not sure she’d like the idea of every mech in the US army knowing what she looks like naked.”
“US Army isn’t keen on that, either. The AI is going to be based on you. It’ll have your moral compass and values, mental toughness and all that jazz. But we’re going to pare it back to the essentials for field use.”
“Won’t that compromise those values you’re after? I mean, if it weren’t for my wedding vows, I’d have slept with Captain Walsh in a heartbeat, regulations be damned.”
“Oh, the core’s still the same. But I can’t imagine you wanting the AI to remember your bank account numbers, email password, kids’ favorite ice cream. That’s all yours, and that’s stuff you’re welcome to keep private. Right this minute, we’ve got a team working diligently to separate the personal from the professional. Hell, even if it weren’t for the privacy concerns—and you and me both know that’s not the army’s top concern here—we need to keep the file size manageable.”
“You’re telling me that giant thing can’t handle all of me?” Skip grinned at the thought that his brain was too big for a machine that size.
Gus chuckled and walked Skip to his ride off base. “All this time and you still think we’re going to make mechs? That project was a pipe dream. It doesn’t even run.”
“But—”
“We use the hangar from Project Atlas, but that pod of yours was as close as you got to machinery. This AI will get scaled down to infantry-sized models, put into fighter jets, even spacecraft. But giant, walking military robots? Jesus, Skip, what are you, twelve or something, believing that crap?”
“Still…”
“Come on, Skip. Forget the fighter-jockey crap for one lousy minute and think big picture. Digital Skip is going to be the first person to visit Mars, to see inside the atmosphere of Jupiter. If there are alien life forms outside our solar system, you’re going to be the one to introduce them to humanity. I didn’t drag you into this to make weapons. That’s near term thinking. That’s funding. That’s holding your nose and doing what’s gotta be done. I needed you because I wanted someone I could trust to be the face of humanity.”
Face of humanity? Skip Harrison? One day, decades or even centuries down the road, some unmanned probe with his personality would greet humanity’s first alien neighbors. Skip Harrison, a guy who hadn’t been the face of anything since his own wedding album.
Skip laughed. “You sure you should be cleaning my personal life out of that ‘bot, then?”
“Yeah…” Gus replied warily. “Any reason we shouldn’t?”
“Hey, without memories of being a happily-married man, you might be letting a robotic James T. Kirk loose on the galaxy.”