Field of Heroes

by Craig Saunders

  Once, Delphine had thought so. Now she knew herself to be startlingly naive. Hers was a youth and young adulthood with an innocent outlook shaped by the simple morality of film, where complexities were necessarily pared down to the barest of bones.

  Is this what real life is?

  She’d seen the results of dissections, but only on a screen.

  While she was all but present, effectively standing in the midst of the interrogation as she was 3-D projected inside the room, the captured Cephal was subjected to the horror of vivisection.

  The Cephal had no eyes. No mouth. Yet still it seemed to her that it had screamed. It felt pain. It was a thinking creature. Of course it felt pain.

  But it did communicate, even though it made no sound at all. She saw the scream, rather than heard, or felt it. A scream in silence and somehow more awful for it.

  What we did was inhuman. Inhumane.

  She didn’t know what she’d believed, only she had wanted to believe; that there was something about the Cephal which might be understood. That they might possess words, or language, or writing. They had technology. How could they have designed ships, weapons, the augments of their slave armies, without some form of communication?

  She knew the truth of it now, and even though it was what she’d suspected, a vague supposition she’d brought to General Ng, the inevitable conclusion still shocked her.

  No human would, or could, understand the Cephal. They were unfathomable to humans, more alien than she had ever imagined.

  They had legs, arms, articulated bodies. Bipedal. Dextrous. Clearly intelligent. But they communicated telepathically. It was clear watching the three Cephal as they were tortured. She didn’t need to know if one felt pain, but if it was transmitted to the others...if they could warn the others of pain to come.

  The three Cephal were each held in separate rooms for their tormentors to carry out what was an almost medieval test.

  One I needed, too...so am I blameless? Hardly.

  Her part in the testing done, Delphine stared at her reflection in the mirror of the toilet block. She wondered if others who saw the horrors she had seen also saw hollowness in eyes that might have once smiled.

  The second and third Cephal had known what was to come as soon as the first felt pain. The third saw and understood the pattern from the experience of the first two of its kin though they didn’t see one another. They were held in separate areas of Nellis, in sealed rooms. No sounds or light or anything could have passed, only that which they had no means of detecting, or replicating. Pure emotion or thought, it didn’t matter to Delphine now.

  Perhaps in a hundred years humanity might form some greater understanding of what the Cephal were, how they came to be, and from where. Or, perhaps they never would.

  She and all the linguistics and communications experts in every natural field had just nigh on proven themselves entirely superfluous in the study of the alien.

  Useless?

  She tried to smile at her reflection, but her lips wouldn’t turn up, no matter how she tried.

  No.

  She wished she was. She didn’t have the stomach for this war.

  ‘Don’t have a choice, do I?’ she asked her grey-faced reflection.

  She still had work to do, and that was her own fault because of that brandy-drunk, maudlin idea of hers which had set all this in motion. The massive push of resources humanity barely had, and the deaths of thousands of soldiers it had taken to achieve it.

  Delphine couldn’t help but see the creature and the terrible things they did to it in the name of science in her mind’s eye, like a replay. She vomited into the sink.

  When all she had left to bring up was bile, Delphine slapped her face to try to knock something into her head except horror. Bashing horror aside with self-inflicted pain. After a fashion, it worked. This time when she looked into the mirror she saw the red mark of her palm on her cheek.

  ‘Enough,’ she told her reflection.

  Delphine wiped her eyes. She wasn’t crying for them. They’d killed billions. They had no compassion for humanity. Did they want the planet? Resources? Did they just wish to kill? Who knew?

  And I, certainly, never will.

  Delphine took one last look at herself in the mirror above the porcelain sink.

  ‘You look like shit,’ she told her reflection.

  She didn’t try to look anything but. She felt like shit and her look, she decided, suited her.

  She found General Ng waiting for her to come back to the small study group from Alexandria who had attended the vivisection. There had been hundreds inside the room, virtually, from institutions like Alexandria all across the world. There were only a few ‘real’ people in the room with the creature at Nellis. That she hadn’t caused the awful pain didn’t change the fact they were all complicit. They had all seen what ‘humane’ really meant when you fought for survival. It meant you did what you deemed necessary, not what you knew was right.

  ‘Dr. Mamet, are you okay?’

  ‘No,’ she said, shaking her head slowly. ‘I can’t get the image from my head. I was looking in the mirror. I couldn’t see myself. I saw the things on the table...like they were me...like...’

  ‘Do you feel pity?’

  ‘No, General Ng. No. Disgust. At us.’

  The General, to his credit, didn’t try to argue Delphine from her assessment, nor comfort her.

  ‘War is disgusting.’

  ‘Do you think they do the same to us? Dissect us? See what we are inside?’

  ‘We did not think so, but who could know? They own the seas. What are they doing there? They can function – thrive – far deeper than we can delve. They might be breeding an army, or designing a planet busting bomb. The simple truth is that we have no way of knowing what they think or do or plan...people like you are our best chance at changing that. Come. Please. The others are waiting.’

  She nodded, feeling thinner and older than she had that morning. It was evening now, and only the day after the battle of Toledo Bend. Already, the soldiers engaged in that battle would be elsewhere.

  Inside the room were eight other people from Alexandria all deep in quiet discussion as though they too felt something similar to the shock and guilt Delphine felt.

  General Ng took the head of a long conference table. There were drinks for everyone laid out, and small snacks for people should they wish. None did.

  ‘We all saw. Please. You’re the experts. Did any of you come to any conclusions? Did you discern anything at all? Any observations?’

  There was a diminutive, quiet woman in the room who Delphine didn’t think had attended the vivisection in person.

  StratInt, she thought.

  What had she expected? The Devil to just not turn up?

  The woman from StratInt stared at Delphine while the General listened to the first tentative observations from around the table.

  There was very little of use.

  ‘Dr. Mamet. You’ve seen, now, what we face. What are your thoughts?’

  She was uncomfortable, suddenly the centre of everyone’s focus, but she knew it was coming.

  ‘General, I don’t think we will be able to communicate with the Cephal in any capacity with our current abilities, or technology, and not within any reasonably foreseeable timescale.’

  The General looked at the assembled experts, pointedly ignoring the woman from StratInt. There was a murmur of agreement with Delphine’s assessment.

  ‘As you suspected?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘But? You spoke to me before the action at Toledo Bend. Do you have any further input? Do you now believe it is an emotion, or some form of telepathic, communicative ability the Cephal possess?’

  She took a breath.

  ‘I do. I think we’re out of a job.’ There was a light chuckle from a few of her colleagues, for which she was embarrassed. She didn’t mean to joke at all. ‘I believe, however, it might be possible to use the Cephal’s strat
egy to improve our abilities.’

  ‘Copy them? I don’t see...’

  ‘Not their telepathic, or empathic, commands.’

  ‘Explain, please,’ said the woman from StratInt. Her voice was surprisingly soft.

  ‘We already have the technology,’ said Delphine, and pointed at the shunt in the StratInt woman’s head, which linked her to the 3rd Generation Global Net. ‘I wonder if we can’t augment soldiers in a similar fashion to you,’ she nodded to the woman.

  ‘An over watch,’ said the StratInt woman, her smile warm but the intellect behind her eyes troubling. ‘Something that learns. A local system. A small network...’

  The General was quiet and thought for a moment.

  ‘It would be a massive upgrade to our units on the ground. Those without suits.’

  ‘We couldn’t roll out such tech in a short matter of time,’ said the woman. Her eyes glazed as she communicated with Global Net. ‘General. With your permission, I’d like to relay this out to the wider network. We think it is viable...and would solve a huge problem for us.’

  ‘Problem?’ said Delphine.

  The StratInt woman nodded. ‘The attrition rate of trained soldiers is something we can’t combat. We’re losing, and we’re losing soldiers every minute. We simply haven’t got the luxury of training every able body to the level that’s needed.’

  ‘By attrition, you mean die?’ said one of Delphine’s colleagues.

  ‘Yes...and we can’t train replacements in minutes. But with this tech? They’d still be straight into the fire with nothing but a gun and luck, but they’d learn so much quicker. Yes,’ said the woman, and Delphine thought she even seemed as excited as someone so close to a giant AI could manage.

  The woman from StratInt stood and moved to leave the room without taking her leave.

  ‘Was it worth it?’ said Delphine, snatching the woman’s arm as she passed.

  ‘I believe it was,’ said the woman. She wasn’t the same woman who had accompanied a sergeant major to speak with Alante Brockner north of Toledo Bend, but with StratInt, it didn’t make much difference. They were basically avatars for Global Net, weren’t they?

  General Ng dismissed them all and when the briefing ended Delphine didn’t feel happy, or vindicated. It did feel like a win, though, no matter how unsavoury.

  Part Four

  We Learned to Love Pain

  Earth – 2294 – 2297 A.D.

  ‘Those marines didn’t know no panic. Sgt. [redacted]’s leg got took clean fucking off and the man, fucking hero, man, he just yells at ‘em, all calm, like, ‘Fucking come the fuck on fuck...’

  ‘And Sgt. [redacted]?’

  ‘Died. ‘Course he did. But ain’t the point. You even fuckin’ listening?’

  From BsCD Multi-world Docudrama (syndicated/right reserved BsCD©2349) ‘To San Diego and Beyond’

  22.

  Sergeant Pain

  - Vidar Dawes

  It was Delphine Mamet, a woman I’d never met, who changed the tide. Tides in any war change a lot. We call them battles.

  I didn’t know anything about any great tacticians. I wasn’t an officer, hadn’t been to any ‘classes’. I was an actual grunt. I did what I was told (unless it was blatantly stupid, I guess...like ‘take a shot from a Cephal for science’). I imagine Delphine Mamet didn’t know much about tactics, either. She was a linguistic. She spoke damn near every language ever thought up by humans. Maybe she spoke dog or cat, too. I don’t know. It was her theory which prompted such a huge effort on the part of our forces to take not just one but three Cephal alive at Toledo Bend.

  The Cephal felt danger, like a vibration. That was why it was so hard to pin them down. So we attacked where the enemy least expected it – where they were supreme. Someone from StratInt, or maybe Global Net itself, made that simple idea a reality.

  Special Marine Services struck before we even moved anywhere near the water. We – 154th, 45th – our dead bobbing along the shoreline or with dirt and dust stuck to dry blood. We were only there so they could take their prize away.

  The results of that day and of all the conversations smart folk had in their coddled bunkers eventually ended up in my head. The literal ‘brain’ child they created for those of us on the ground wasn’t childish in the slightest. In fact, it was more like having a teacher watch over us, saying ‘no, not like that...like this.’

  Grunts need that. That’s why there’s a chain of command, I guess.

  It was a scientist, not a General, who taught us how to fight smarter. Delphine Mamet’s idea, someone else’s pain. That’s what we named our over watch ‘Sergeant Pain’. It felt right.

  She (they gave her a feminine sounding voice) was indispensable. Without her, we might not have got off Earth at all, and by Zoa her extra eyes and ears were second nature for my company. She had all our backs. She kept more soldiers alive than bravery or fear did.

  No one made us do it. They told us what Sergeant Pain was, of course. She was a limited system, a simple AI implanted into our heads so we would function as a unit rather than a bunch of yahoos with guns. Patriot Company were the guinea pigs. We still signed up for it.

  By then, we were fighting for something. Earth? Survival? Sure. We fought for those. But like you can’t see something huge, we’re small minds. We’re not StratInt. We were infantry. We were soldiers. We saw what was immediate. What’s immediate for a soldier? Not the end game, but each battle and after so many of them with the brothers and sisters by our side the thing we fought for most was each other. Some of us had been at the war game for long enough to consider each other worth taking a shot for, if not dying for. No one wants to die for someone else. That’s a shitty deal.

  Sergeant Pain sounded like a bad deal, too, on the face of it. ‘Side effects’ of the procedure included possible instantaneous death. Probably agony. Headaches almost certainly. A chance of blindness, numbness, palsy, paralysis to varying degrees. Brain bleeds, strokes. There were an awful lot of ways to go out with long Latin names on a list I signed at the bottom with a blue stylo on a datapad. I glossed over at the sight of those words. The idea of sudden death registered, and still I signed willingly. Not happily, not exactly, but it was like joining the Army in the first place. I was dead without the Army. With this new AI implant I figured we had a slight chance of being better at not dying.

  The kicker was the promise of becoming a true unit. Not a singularity like bees, which might know the swarm’s thoughts. No. We wouldn’t be telepathic. But what we saw and heard? That would be filtered and sifted by that small, local intellect housed in our heads which would run on our own brains electrical impulses and relay that input in turn from not just one soldier’s eyes, but from the whole unit. Sergeant Pain didn’t promise omniscience but cohesion.

  Out of nearly five hundred soldiers who were eligible near enough ninety percent of us agreed. It was that or get subsumed, seconded, to yet another division or battle group. By the time they brought up the idea of Sergeant Pain, we were good together. The idea of fighting with a new bunch didn’t appeal. We lost more to death after the operations were carried out than the attrition to our unit through denial. In the first month, we lost another dozen soldiers to infection. In the first year, we lost even more to madness. Having a voice in your head isn’t easy. At least it was a nice voice. Her voice was like velvet. She was the best sergeant I ever knew.

  23.

  Shunt

  - Vidar Dawes

  Fighting with Sergeant Pain in our heads wasn’t going to make war any harder. The process wasn’t nice, though. They jammed a metal shunt straight into my head, with a small port for upgrades behind my ear. Inside of me I was told it would look like a tree’s roots reaching down to feed off my brain electrical chemistry, but also a symbiotic relationship, too, because it would give back information, and in an instant, directly where it needed to go. I didn’t bother learning the anatomy. I knew what brains looked like and wished I didn’t. I didn’t want t
o be able to names the parts of people I saw splayed on a battlefield in Latin, too.

  Sgt. Pain would have access to what we saw and heard. Not feelings, like the Cephal might, nor smell or taste (which, frankly, machines sucked at).

  The installation, or augment, took around three hours. It was carried out by medmechs with surgeons to double check the work because humans still didn’t trust the tech which extended and improved our lives.

  It didn’t hurt when they did it. It hurt after though, and worse than anything I’d experienced to date...or anything I remembered, anyway. I had the mother of all headaches on waking from the anaesthetic. On top of that, I was utterly blind in my right eye for the first three days and my right arm wouldn’t quite do what it was told. That passed by the end of the week, and the residual weakness soon after that.

  It wasn’t until all of us were augmented that they switched us ‘on’.

  Around four hundred of us were in a field, facing out. It was a simple calibration test so they could work on synchronising us. Three targets were going to pop up outside of the wide circle formed by soldiers. We weren’t to call out, or turn our heads. Just use our eyes. They weren’t dumb enough to give us weapons for the calibration exercise.

  So there we were with a newly born limited AI in our heads. Our human senses were all saying ‘here, here’, giving Pain optical input only. But that input was coming from three different directions, from all the sources (humans) in place to see the pop-ups.

  We were told to turn three ways – not wildly complicated, but those directions came all at once. It was very much like having a triumvirate of Sergeants yelling different orders at the same time directly into our nascent, joined minds.

  Some of us stumbled, disoriented. Some jumped, some yelled. We all turned about, this way and that, because Pain was us telling all the same thing, all at once, and for the first time not exactly into our ears, but inside our ears. Into our little cochleae, or ear hairs, or lobes, or with some internal vibration that presented itself like a weird buzz as though we’d just had a tuning fork stuck inside our ear as we staggered off a rollercoaster, and that buzz had asked us to dance.