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“So what, exactly, are you?” was Lucia’s understandable, if not entirely polite, question. For reasons purely practical, Roland had brought her unconscious form back to his apartment in Dockside. Since she was obviously being pursued vigorously, he needed to get her out of sight quickly; and he lived in highly convenient proximity to The Smoking Wreck. He liked to consider that a coincidence, but he knew deep down that living close to his favorite bar was more than a little intentional. Lucia sat in one of the two normal sized chairs in his otherwise blandly furnished apartment. Roland did not entertain often, and his domicile reflected both his girth and his military background in its spartan décor.
A generous Army pension and numerous paying gigs as a Dockside ‘fixer’ meant a comfortable existence, if not an extravagant one. His apartment was bigger than most, and in a section of Dockside that was at least two standard deviations above the mean for squalor and crime level. Roland didn’t have to sweat petty crime that much. Every mugger, bruiser, drug-dealer and pimp in Dockside knew to give Roland’s apartment a wide berth. Roland appreciated peace and quiet. Those that disturbed the peace became examples for the rest, and it had been a long time since he had needed to reinforce the lesson.
The apartment had three largish rooms. A kitchen, a bedroom, and a living room; as well as a bathroom. His furniture was sized and built for his stature out of necessity and represented the only really expensive items in the place. It was kept to military standards for orderliness, and while tidy, exuded no real warmth. Lucia acknowledged, in an archaic fashion, that it certainly lacked a ‘woman’s touch.’
Roland had not been expecting company, but he was lucky enough to have a few beers in the fridge. He offered the lady a lager while she pulled herself together. Of course, Roland always had beer handy, so luck may not have been much of a factor. When you weigh a thousand pounds, and have things inside you that make getting drunk very difficult, you are going to go through a lot of beer.
“What am I?” Roland feigned offense, “I’m a decorated veteran. What are you?”
Lucia at least had the decency to appear sheepish, “I’m sorry! I just...” she gestured at him, “I mean... uh... what are... uh... you? Like a cyborg or something?”
He tried to smile in a disarming manner. He was bad at it, and he hoped she accepted the gesture in the spirit he was trying to deliver it. She relaxed visibly at his feeble attempt, and he took that as a good sign. Roland was not what most would call a ‘people person.’ But neither was he a stupid man. He had muddled through a few years of engineering school and had been a proficient combat engineer during his traditional military service. He understood physics and chemistry better than most, and further schooling during the process of making him into what he ultimately ended up becoming had made him fairly conversant in his own systems. His imperfect understanding of the harder science coupled with his natural inclination to brusqueness made explaining it all somewhat tricky.
“Technically, it’s classified. I can go to jail for telling you and you could go to jail for knowing. But,” he paused for a moment, choosing his words carefully, “... since the answer probably has a lot to do with your father’s trouble, I’ll clue you in.” He gestured to the fridge, “It’s a fairly long story, so grab a fresh beer if you need one.”
Lucia took his advice and cracked open another can of beer. She settled into the chair and assumed an exaggerated listening pose, “I’ve got nowhere to be, buddy.”
“I’m not what most people think of when they think ‘cyborg’, per se...” he began in a wholly inadequate introduction. “I mean, I have inorganic components, but it’s different from a regular prosthesis,” he continued, as if that cleared everything up.
Lucia’s scrunched brow only reinforced the sinking feeling in Roland’s guts that he was making no damn sense.
He sighed, “Cyborgs get body parts replaced with artificial versions of stuff. If a guy gets his regular arm blown off, the army puts a metal arm back on. That arm is just a mechanical replacement for the organic thing that got lost.”
Lucia looked at him; took in all seven and a half feet and nine-hundred-and-forty pounds of him, and politely asked, “So none of... that...” she gestured in his direction, “... constitutes ‘mechanical versions of stuff?’ ”
“Well... sort of...” Roland backtracked. This was not going well, “It’s not so much ‘mechanical’ in the traditional sense. It’s...” Unable to find a better way to explain, he simply told her what he had been told, “It’s mostly techno-organic myofibrillar and osteoplastic analogs.” He shrugged, “my body is not strictly organic, but it’s close enough that my brain thinks it is, and my nervous system treats it like it is.”
Lucia did not look convinced, “I’m not going to lie. I have no idea what any of that even means.”
“My body parts were not built in a shop and then attached to me like other ’borgs,” he sighed. “The body was grown, molecule by molecule, from polymers that mimic human muscle and bone. My own DNA was used as blueprint, so my nervous system would treat it just like my own bones and muscles.”
She gasped, “Oh my god! Is your real body underneath all that...” she gesticulated wildly, “... stuff?”
Roland shrugged, “Some of it. We call the techno-organic stuff the ‘chassis’ or sometimes the ‘frame.’ It helps differentiate the systems.” He went on, “The chassis was grown separately, but most of my organic mass was removed long before my nervous system was transferred.” Roland wasn’t sure that was the right way to phrase it. His arms, legs, and several of his internal organs had conveniently been removed by separatist explosives prior to his conversion, but that was a much longer and grislier story. One he’d prefer not to get into at this exact moment, to be honest.
“My liver, pancreas, heart and other organs were replaced with better synthetic versions grown from my own DNA by the program.” That wasn’t the whole story. He didn’t mention that he didn’t have lungs or that his heart was an actual mechanical pump. It seemed like unnecessary detail. His spine and skull had been reinforced to an absurd degree with liberal quantities of bleeding-edge polymers. The skin of his face and head were laced with a fast-repairing mesh of artificial skin lattice. It gave his face a flat, dull, sheen; and the greatest scientists of Earth’s mightiest military hadn’t been able to figure out how to get hair to grow on it, either.
The program had regrown or rebuilt the balance of his limbs and organs, peeled the skin from his torso, and mounted the depleted, raw, and bleeding meat that was Roland Tankowicz into a home-grown cybernetic body built right to the specs of his own DNA.
“I was a big boy before I got all cyberized, so my chassis ended up looking like this,” he flexed playfully, straining the seams of his 4XL shirt. “I don’t think this is the look they were going for, but it’s what they got,” he added, trying to lighten the mood. She chuckled politely.
Roland had been a large, powerful man when he joined the United Earth Defense Force. What had been six-foot-six and nearly three hundred pounds of idealism and enthusiasm got pulled right from the front lines of a Venusian border dispute and plopped into the most ambitious warfighter enhancement project in human history. This had been for the best, really. The injuries he sustained on Venus were not going to be survivable, and everyone knew it. He mentioned this without going into too much morbid detail.
“Thankfully, it seemed, the Army had plans for me, and it was all going to be OK. They would just build me a new body!” He snorted derisively, “You know, as long as I agreed to a few terms and signed some waivers. Shoulda read the fine print, first.”
Since his options had consisted of “sign here or die a horrible slow death,” he had gone ahead and volunteered for the program. The Army delivered as promised: the new body grown for him matched all his genetic potential and enhanced it. Impressive musculature became extreme, and what had once been a big, strong man was now a towering technological juggernaut.
“Most of me is just high-tech synthetic versions of regular human tissue. I have a synthetic immune system and even synthetic blood.”
That was a rather gross oversimplification. A veritable swarm of nanomachines took the place of blood and other cells in the techno-organic hulk, and billions of microscopic robots moved resources around and suppled energy and fuel to the various systems. Roland’s remaining organics (such as they were) still had and employed human blood, but thanks to those little ’bots, most of the resources he needed could be gleaned from any environment. Minerals and chemicals could be consumed as raw materials, or synthesized from available properties in the environment. Oxygen was scrubbed from virtually any combination of atmospheric gasses, or simply used in a miserly fashion from the onboard stores.
A testimony to his builder’s commitment to durability, approximately 150 pounds of Roland’s total mass was allocated just for spare resource materials. His faithful nanobots could rebuild an entire limb from these stores, provided Roland had the time and energy to accomplish such a task.
Which was a bit of an issue, actually. Energy was not a big deal when he was still with the army. Roland was equipped with the same military-grade ShipCel that powered the Avenger-class strike drone, and the Army had lots of those lying around. If Roland limited himself to basic locomotion and everyday tasks, then the power source was good for close to a decade before the core needed recharging. At standard combat-theater output, he might get nine months out of a full charge. Full Power? He’d be lucky to get thirty days. It was something he had to stay on top of though, because when Roland ran out of ShipCel power, his body stopped moving. That can be a very big deal when one is built from a half-ton of exotic metal and plastic. In an emergency, he was capable of absorbing most frequencies of electromagnetic radiation and converting them to power, but it was brutally slow and exposure to direct sunlight on Earth would net barely enough juice to walk very, very, slowly. It was an ugly proposition.
Adding another layer of complexity to his power issues, Roland’s body was not strictly his own. It remained officially classified as “defunct military ordnance” and as such he could not easily acquire new ShipCels for it. The Army had scores of them, but Roland was not in a position to requisition any from his former employer. Purchasing one would cost more than a nice house in the suburbs, and he was nowhere near having that kind of money. Basically, Roland had to get creative when it came to managing his power needs.
ShipCels could be recharged, but that meant plugging in and sitting for a very long time; and ShipCels had a limited number of recharges in them before they required new cores. He had been out of the military for twenty-five years, and Roland was on his third ShipCel. The last one he had to ‘acquire’ from a black-market gun-runner who had a crashed Avenger stashed on one of Saturn’s moons. Roland was not slavishly loyal to the government, nor was he overly fastidious about operating in strict legality, but dealing with that gun-runner had left a bad taste in his mouth. He had set himself more than one mental reminder to murder that particular bastard at some point. He just hadn’t gotten around to it yet.
His current ’Cel was in good shape, and he did his best to keep it topped off by plugging in at night. The power bills were brutal, but he didn’t know what else to do. If he stayed out of pitched battles and charged obsessively, he might get twenty years out of this one. That was the plan anyway.
Keeping his power consumption low wasn’t all that hard. At 100% output, Roland could press close to twenty tons over his head, or sprint sixty miles per hour on a straightaway. Hilariously, he had virtually no ability to turn corners at that speed, but technically he could go that fast if he needed to. Since that sort of silliness was rarely necessary, getting through the typical day used only the tiniest fraction of juice. If he avoided strenuous activities, then eight hours on the charger was usually enough to offset a typical sixteen-hour day of working and drinking. The power bill was a little painful, but he could afford it. Roland felt it was worth it if it helped put off sourcing another ’Cel.
The eighty-six pounds of organic material that lay cocooned inside all this high-tech wonderment was easier to handle; as the needs of the flesh were comparatively tiny compared to those of the machine. Why he retained eighty-six pounds of organic material was an altogether different story. Organic components served very little purpose in the interstellar combat theater, and were technically a weak link in the system due to their inherent squishy-ness and incessant need for fuel, air, and water. Lucia wondered aloud if it would have behooved the project to eliminate them, “Why didn’t they make all of you... uhm... synthetic?”
Roland paused. It was a good question, but the answer was difficult to explain. The technology for full prosthesis certainly existed. But his human components remained part of him all the same, for reasons that Roland didn’t really want to get into. But, he was forced to admit, the answer to that question was likely linked to why Lucia’s father had sent her to him.
It seemed he would get into it, anyway.
“If the military had wanted another robot, they could have just built a robot,” he shrugged. “As a matter of fact, the military builds robots all the time.” The battlefield of the twenty-fifth century was almost entirely unmanned; namely because most of the places humans fought over were extremely hostile to mankind. It was just good strategy to send robots and drones to those places, instead. “Robots don’t satisfy the need for ethical command and control on the battlefield, though,” he said, “Somebody on-site needs to decide when to pull the trigger and when not to. Somebody has to handle communications with locals and any person-to-person interactions that pop up.”
The problem was that a robot could not make the sort of life-or-death decisions in real time that a person could. Remote drones at least had a human operator somewhere to make the call, but deep in the field there was still a demand for a thinking, feeling, decision-making person. “We’ve got Anson Gates pushing us out to entirely new solar systems, now. We’re going to all sorts of weird planets, dealing with new lifeforms and landing in all sorts of screwed-up situations. We needed human boots on the ground. Space suits are just too damn flimsy and power armor is too clunky and expensive. Sure, the Army runs a few cyborg armatures at any given time, but most men are unwilling to be mounted to one since the army is already required to pay for prosthetics for veterans.”
“The first attempts were almost entirely cybernetic. The only human element they left was the brain and a portion of the spinal column; which they transplanted into a big, heavy mobile chassis.” They were essentially human nervous systems contained in armed and armored delivery systems. The result was a super-durable, highly self-sufficient variable threat response system with robotic speed and modularity, with a human being at the controls in real time and space. Or, “Tanks with brains,” as Roland explained it to Lucia, “Ugly, but tough as hell.”
“But the robot bodies with human brains tended to... uh... go nuts under the pressure,” was Roland’s truncated version of the problem with the first generation of cyborg soldiers. While the actual surgeries to produce these units were fairly successful, the minds of the soldiers themselves became very unstable very quickly. With no humanity to cling to, they simply went insane. Most committed suicide, several had to be decommissioned manually. Roland thought (almost wistfully), “‘Decommissioned manually’ is just a nice way of saying ‘blown to pieces because they went on murderous rampages.’ ”
“They tried putting human brains in android bodies, too, but that was only a little better.” This was a grievous understatement.
He went on to explain that the next attempts tried to minimize this effect producing a more analogous chassis. The theory was that if the chassis felt more human, more normal, to the brain driving it, then it would be less likely to disassociate in a manner that led to sociopathy. Those versions were supremely unwieldy and combat effectiveness was poor. Human brains in android bodies were awkward and a little dangerous; the control systems were just too incompatible. Also, these units went just as insane as the previous ones. The human psyche just could not tolerate a total prosthesis.
The researchers eventually realized that psychological stability was linked to the mental and physical needs and desires that people had to navigate as fickle and emotional creatures. Removing a human brain from all its needs, desires, and physical feedback; and then dumping it to a hardened weapons platform did not deliver the desired results. Roland said it succinctly, “Turned out to be a terrible idea.”
Human sanity, and the decision-making ability the program needed from its participants, required humanity. Roland continued, “A soldier in the field fought for something. They fought for greed. They fought for patriotism. They fought for sunsets out at the lake on a summer evening. Even a man permanently mounted to an armature still felt like a man. Total prosthesis took that all away from a guy, and it drove them insane.”
Good soldiers are supposed to fight for all the things that make life worth living and turning them into machines made life not worth living anymore. At least not as a human, anyway, and therein lived the problem. When life had no value, these former soldiers very quickly deteriorated into nihilistic AI’s.
Nobody wants a nihilistic AI piloting a hyper-tough weapons platform, it turns out. Suicides and catastrophic psychological failures plagued the second generation. Two notable members of that cohort found their way into action, but the rest either died or were ‘decommissioned.’
“Success rate was .01% for that generation,” he explained.
Roland tried to gloss over the grimmer aspects of these failures, but Lucia wasn’t stupid enough to misunderstand what he meant. Roland pushed onward to the important parts. “For Project: Golem, they decided to take a completely different track: They built a better human, but still let it be human.”
Essentially, Project: Golem scientists grew a synthetic body based upon each volunteer’s DNA. The new tissues and structures were grown to the exact specifications dictated by the donor’s own genetics, making the new synthetic body move and feel like it should to the nervous system controlling it. It was important to the project that the body feel exactly like a flesh and blood version to the brain driving it. This resulted in some loss of performance compared to more mechanical models. Roland explained, “Big ’ol linear actuators and high-torque motors would have produced a more powerful machine, but human muscle fiber was mimicked, anyway. They could have replaced my nerves with computerized electronic control signals, and that may have made me faster and more efficient, but the point was that the whole body would work off of the soldier’s existing nervous system and motor control.” He shrugged, “We were weaker and slower than the other generations. But more successful in the field because of it.”
“So, the short version is that to keep the guys from going nuts, they built an android chassis that was EXACTLY like the original body, just better. They basically grew new bodies out of better materials for us. Which was great. Except for when it wasn’t great.”
Lucia frowned, “When was that?”
“I’m gonna need another beer for this part.”