Rhodes climbed out of his capsule and stood up in front of Dr. Osborne. “What’s the story?” Osborne asked.

“Everything’s fine,” Rhodes replied. “You can run your tests on Fisher now. He’s fully functional.”

“So….is he talking to you now?”

Rhodes nodded. “He’s talking and showing himself to me. I don’t think you’ll find anything wrong with him.”

Osborne furrowed his brow at the controls on the wall. “His stress levels and emotional distress responses are elevated.”

“Are they more elevated than mine—or anyone else’s in the battalion?”

“No, they’re normal compared to those—and they seem to match yours exactly.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“I guess there isn’t one. It just isn’t what I expected. These SAMs are supposed to be emotionless. That’s what’s supposed to make them valuable advisors in combat conditions.”

“I’d say the SAMs are adapting to the conditions,” Rhodes pointed out. “They’ve experienced some extreme conditions since each of them came online. It only makes senses that the conditions would affect each SAM in a unique way. Don’t you think?”

Osborne shrugged without turning around. “I guess that makes sense. These SAMs were designed to be impartial and non-reactive to stressful situations, but they were also designed to be sentient and to form attachments to their hosts and other members of the battalion. The SAMs were designed to bond with people and each other the way humans do. So I guess it was bound to happen sooner or later that the SAMs would develop emotional responses just as people do.”

“Is there any evidence to suggest that the SAMs are functioning outside the normal range—apart from when they really are suffering from some recognizable malfunction? These emotional responses aren’t malfunctions, are they?”

“No, nothing like that,” Osborne replied. “Right now, for instance, Fisher is registering an emotional distress response to our conversation, but I don’t detect any malfunction. It appears….” He frowned again. “It would be considered normal if I was reading it in a real person.”

Rhodes didn’t correct the doctor by reminding him that Fisher was a real person—as real as any organic living person.

Fisher had feelings—and who could blame him? He’d gone through the meat grinder along with the rest of Battalion 1.

Now he faced the prospect of confronting his own kind on the battlefield and either destroying them or letting them destroy Rhodes and the rest of the battalion.

Fisher and the other SAMs were caught in a double bind. They were entangled in a no-win situation with astronomical stakes riding on their every choice, thought, action—and even their every word.

Rhodes didn’t see how anyone could go through that without suffering some emotional distress. So Fisher was as stressed and anguished over this as he would have been if he’d been a real person. Why was anyone surprised?

He remained silent through Rhodes’s and Osborne’s conversation. Osborne checked a few more readings and eventually satisfied himself that Rhodes and Fisher were both functioning as well as they could be expected to be.

“So what happens next?” Rhodes asked.

“I suggest you take the evening off and relax,” Osborne replied. “I don’t know how much more opportunity you’ll have to do that. We’ll start waking up your subordinates tomorrow one at a time. If they malfunction or if your SAMs malfunction as a result of you meeting each other, then we could be right back up the shit creek where we were before.”

Rhodes went back to the capsule hold. Someone had cleaned the place up, removed all the battalion’s destroyed capsules, replaced them with new ones, and rewired all of them into the walls the way they should be.

He couldn’t fathom how the Legion brass got new capsules out this far on such short notice.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

The brass could probably accomplish a lot more than that if it meant covering up just what a shit show this whole project turned out to be.

No trace remained that the glorious soldiers of Battalion 1 had turned their super-advanced weaponry on each other, killed the Ruling Council President’s daughter in cold blood, and were now in even greater danger than ever of being switched off for the safety of peace-loving citizens everywhere.

Rhodes threw himself down at the desk. He was all alone. Oakes wasn’t here and Rhodes didn’t have a single scrap of paper to draw on.

He still had Fisher, though. They didn’t have to talk because Rhodes already said it all.

He told Fisher, at last, how much he needed his SAM. Neither of them could deny any longer just how interdependent they were.

Rhodes didn’t want to deny it any longer. He wanted to depend on Fisher for his very life, his sanity, and any shred of a future he might have left. He couldn’t think of anyone else he would or could trust.

He couldn’t face all this solitude without it threatening to snap his last nerve. He was just making up his mind to go back into another conversion cycle. Anything was better than listening to this silence.

He stood up and stopped in his tracks when Dr. Trudeau hustled into the hold. He glanced right and left as if anyone might overhear their conversation.

“Is something wrong?” Rhodes asked. “Did something happen after I left the lab?”

“No, no. Not at all.” Trudeau rushed up to Rhodes, but the young doctor wouldn’t hold eye contact for more than a second. “I was wondering if we could talk—in private.”

Rhodes waved at the room around him. “It doesn’t get more private than this.” He frowned at Trudeau. “What’s the matter? What do you want to say here that you couldn’t say in the lab?”

Trudeau lowered his voice to a rushed whisper. “I couldn’t tell you in front of Osborne. I mean….he knows and everything…”

Rhodes’s alarm bells went off. “Knows what?”

“He just doesn’t want you to know—see?” Trudeau blurted out. “He didn’t want me to tell you, but I figured it could be important to the battalion’s safety—so you had to know.”

Rhodes locked his jaws tight. “What’s important to the battalion’s safety?”

“It was Dietz,” Trudeau whispered. “He wasn’t targeting Henshaw when he shot her.”

Rhodes raised his eyebrow. “Are you saying….?”

“He was targeting everyone else—the way all of you were. He suffered the same malfunction—but he wasn’t targeting Henshaw. He….just snapped. See what I mean? He grabbed her and shot her for no reason. That was no malfunction.”

Rhodes sighed and let his shoulders slump. “Okay. Thank you for telling me.”

Trudeau’s eyes fell out of their sockets. “You…..don’t tell me you knew about this! He’s a raving psycho! What the hell is he doing in the battalion?! We should take him offline before he wakes up. He shouldn’t return to the battalion at all!”

“Did you tell Osborne that?”

“Of course!” Trudeau’s voice started to rise and he stopped himself to squash it again. “He won’t listen. He thinks there’s some mistake. He thinks Dietz malfunctioned some other way—something not related to the targeting system going haywire.”

Rhodes turned away toward his capsule. “Tell Osborne to check Dietz’s criminal record.”

“Why? What’s on it?”

“I’m not sure, but I’m betting it’s something that explains this. This isn’t the first time he’s turned his weapon on someone else in the battalion. He’s even shot at them and nearly killed them. He was a raving psycho before he joined the battalion. Now he’s a raving psycho in the battalion. If you really want so badly to take him offline, his criminal record is the way to do it.”

“Can’t you explain it to Osborne?” Trudeau asked.

“How could I do that without giving away that you told me about Dietz not targeting Henshaw?”

“I mean…” Trudeau shuffled his feet. “If it’s a matter of the battalion’s safety, then I wouldn’t mind him knowing that I told you.”

Rhodes tapped his capsule to open the cover. “Don’t do anything—and don’t mention to Osborne again about taking Dietz offline.”

“Why not? You can’t seriously expect to go into combat with a freak like that.”

“I already have—more than once. He actually behaves himself pretty well in combat. He only acts psycho when he malfunctions—or when we’re all malfunctioning. I won’t say I’m ultra-pleased with his behavior, but I’m not prepared to take a man offline because of that.”

Trudeau furrowed his brow and pursed his lips. “That’s exactly what Osborne said.”

“I really appreciate you telling me, but it doesn’t change anything.”

“Except that Henshaw is dead.”

Rhodes shrugged. “It could have been any of us—either as the killer or the victim.”

“I don’t see it that way. You, Lauer, Oakes, and Thackery all tried your hardest not to shoot anyone. You, Thackery, and Henshaw actually stopped your SAMs from shooting at anyone. Dietz could have done the same thing.”

“You don’t know that. You’re talking about ending a man’s life for something that may or may not have been his fault. You better come up with something more compelling than this.”

Trudeau narrowed his eyes. “It’s your funeral—and your subordinates’ funerals. Don’t you care about your people’s safety?”

“Dietz is my subordinate and you’re talking about sending him to his funeral. It’s my job to protect his safety as much as the others.”

Trudeau stared at Rhodes tapping on his capsule to open his cover. Trudeau was still standing there when Rhodes sat down on the mattress.

He didn’t plan to go to sleep. He just wanted to lie down, shut his eyes, and pretend not to think about all this.

“All right,” Trudeau finally declared. “I’ll tell him to look at Dietz’s criminal record.”

“You do that.” Rhodes leaned over to lie down. “I wish you all the luck in the world.”

End of Chapter 31.