As the limousine carried them from the airport, Dara sat back and closed her eyes. It has been a long night, last night. She was tired. She had finals coming up soon. Her History of the Solar System class was interesting, but there was a lot to learn and memorize. She thought back to yesterday’s class, and visualized Professor Darlington as she lectured.
“What you’ve got to remember is that the Marines are not
people”,
“Now, here in the 22’nd century, we have the perfect fighting machine, the Marine. A single human officer can extend his fighting ability a hundred-fold with a squad of Marines. With halo technology and the Nexus, that human officer can direct the action from the comfort of the back lines. No fighter need place himself, or herself, into harm’s way. Yes, a question in the back?”
“It’s all very well to say they aren’t human”, the voice of
that smart-ass
“That question was settled by the
Darlington continued addressing
The issue of the Marines presented a similar dilemma; trying
to define what was human and what was not.
The question could no longer be decided on a genetic basis, not in this
day and age. Humanity had grown used to
using cloned human neural tissue in its computers. This had been happening for decades. We could no longer survive without them. And yet cloned neural tissue was probably
closer to the
She actually raised her hand to bring these thoughts up, but
brought it down before
The lecture had continued while Dara ruminated. She cursed silently. The problem with this class was that it made her think too much. She always missed half the lecture while she woolgathered away. Of course, her halo was recording the lecture. But that meant she would have to review the recording later, and she had a Tankball game tonight and she had to work tomorrow. She guessed she would be having a late night. She turned her attention back to the lecture.
“The development of the Marines as an infantry tool could not have happened without the invention of the first practical neural coupler back in the mid-21st century. Is there anybody who doesn’t know what a neural coupler is? Ah, I see some blank stares. Well, folks, just put a hand up to your foreheads and touch your halos. The Halo, or Integrated Maintenance Peripheral, the IMP as some call it. The Halo is a simple example of the application of neural coupler technology. The Mind-Machine Interface. You all depend on your halos quite a bit, don’t you? They’re indispensable. Without the neural coupler, you people would be on your own, dependent entirely on your own senses of sight, hearing, taste, and touch. You would no longer be in touch with the Nexus. Without the neural coupler, you would actually have to attend this class in person. You could no longer watch ‘Bent in the Middle’ sing their latest hit. You would be talking to the Nexus using voice, or worse yet, those horrid keyboards they used in the last century. There is no end to the list of benefits that the neural coupler has brought to modern society.”
“Before the neural coupler, the fighting soldier was
dependent on robotic warriors using artificial intelligence, and we all know
how quirky AI can be. The armed forces sufferered many a friendly fire episode before the neural
coupler came along. You all remember the
“The neural coupler brought the capability for a single officer to control a squad of Marines from afar. So now we have a fighting force where the soldier never has to worry about his own ass. He can be safe in the back lines, and yet have excellent access to what his squad is seeing and doing. Warfare has become more humane, less violent.”
She droned on, but Dara was lost in thought again. Humane warfare, she says. She wondered if the Marines felt pain when they were shot to pieces. After all, they had human tissue. They had nerves, muscle, organs, a circulatory system, and a heart. They were capable of sensing the environment using those nerves; they could touch, they could feel pressure. When they were damaged, there must be some signal to their neural matrix brains that something had gone wrong. How did they perceive such signals? She didn’t know, and her researches had turned up nothing on the subject. It was all highly classified.
And, of course, there were many who didn’t utilize Marines. The Martians and the Mining Habs refused to deploy them on ethical grounds. Many groups in the solar system could not afford them. About the only groups who used Marines were Earth and the Outer Planets Organization. So that meant it was very probable that in any action, Marines would be fighting against flesh and blood humans. That was most decidedly not humane. Who would win out in a battle between Marines and human soldiers? There had been one-sided skirmishes before, but no decisive battles to decide the issue. Theoretically, forces deploying Marines had the advantage. Marines were savage fighters and were incapable of anything except obeying orders. On the practical side, Dara knew people who insisted that mindless automatons could not prevail against sufficiently trained and motivated human soldiers.
Of course, asking her professor about all of this was not an
option.
Dara opened her eyes, back in the present. Mossburg and Wilder were chatting quietly in the middle section of the limousine. Their conversation was inaudible to her and her compatriots in the back section, blocked by the transparent partition separating them. She supposed she could ask the Nexus to pipe the conversation back to them. But she didn’t want to concentrate at the moment. She just wanted to relax and recover. They were almost to their destination. There would be plenty of opportunity then to study these Earthworms, to try to untangle what they said from what they meant. She closed her eyes again, this time striving to avoid thinking about anything. That was something she had never been able to do, and now was no exception.