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The thwip thwip from their silenced carbines is all but drowned out by the thuds of tower sentries hitting the ground.
Bounding out from the tangle of vines and branches, Teo falls in behind Scheppe as he cues his SyNAPS—and then he feels it, they all do.
The tickle.
That vague sense of suddenly more, of awareness expanding.
And then the WHAM as they drop into collective flowstate.
Untrained individuals would be almost immediately incapacitated. And indeed, only a small percentage of a small percentage of top-tier operators can function at such high integration aspect ratios.
For Teo and the rest, the disinhibition factors are dialed so high that they receive almost complete peripheral sense sharing.
Never mind assumptions from laypersons that the majority of inputs are purely somatic and thus don’t register in conscious awareness—instead merely manifesting as heightened urges or particularly intense ‘gut feelings’—in reality, when integrated so fully with multiple agents, the sensorium rising into any one user’s conscious awareness quickly becomes an overwhelming cacophony if lacking the requisite training and natural aptitude.
For once, popular media tends to get it right when they show the ‘subconsciously integrated assault teams’ conducting raids with preternatural coordination, speed, and a conspicuous absence of visible communication.
thwip thwip
In the small pillbox outside, a man takes a drag from his last cigarette.
thwip thwip
The man sitting across from him has just enough time to flinch at the spray of brain and skull before his too are smeared across the room.
thwip thwip
The third man doesn’t have time to register anything at all.
Although Hollywood depictions of Military-Grade SyNAPS—classified as that particular flavor of neural networking tech is—do miss the mark in some important respects. Most notably those of Average-Joe-turned-suddenly-spec-ops-extraordinaire and of operatives losing all personal agency, as becoming slaves to some sort of ‘hive mind’.
In reality, merely networking subconsciouses doesn’t magically generate competency, whether in small unit tactics, collaborative analyses at university, or anything else. Even the CerebrOrgys in the kink scene tend to be invite only for a reason: when networked, it takes a lot of practice to get good at something, even if that something is just the simple act of getting off.
There’s no reason 10 random Baselines picked off the street and linked together would generate anything other than a chaotic maelstrom of amplified biases and confusion-turned-up-to-11. An army of the ultimate Dunning-Krugers barely able to string together a cogent sentence.
But when the Nodes are disciplined, focused, of favorable predisposition, and well funded, it’s a different story entirely. Such high quality Networks get really, really good at what they do. Be it devising the next catchy jingle for a corporate ad campaign, facilitating the Eureka Moment for a room of grad-students, cumming really fucking hard—or, in certain clandestine instances, being the scalpel with which a superpower excises certain sociopolitical tumors in its vie for dominance.
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And true, their whole squad may operate in perfect unison as though of one mind, but, as Teo knows from first hand experience, the lights very much stay on for each individual. There is no blackout. No transcendence into a consciousless Nirvana, despite what some bead counting Om chanters might imagine.
And philosophical debate whether the shared intelligence emerging from the Network constitutes a distinct POV in and of itself notwithstanding, each Node in that hypothetical-maybe-mind still feels an I in the driver’s seat, regardless the level of integration.
thwip thwip
And so the I identifying itself as Teo is very much present and accounted for as his subsonic flechettes deform the head of the man reaching for the HK.
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Dropping over the wall, tac glass again paints the scene in technicolor, neon icons dancing above technicals scattered about the compound.
A dozen Zhongxing Grand Tiger 2s with ancient Brownings and recoilless rifles mounted to their beds. And a nearly century old Hilux adjacent to a barrel of something the glass flags caution: probable explosive.
A flurry of motion as pinpoint headshots drop those loitering about the vehicles one after another, team’s advance never slowing.
The sky has turned the color of overmixed paint, but with his augs Teo sees clear as day.
He wonders if it looks this ugly to the others too. He wonders just how it is exactly that everyone is experiencing this particular evening.
He knows each of them—each Node in this Network—maintains personal subjective continuity, but he has it on good authority that the contents of each of these subjectivities varies.
Even if the end result is the same, even if they all net multiple standard deviation improvements above the mean in reaction time, non-verbal communication, problem-solving, tactical foresight, and a dozen other relevant metrics, the experience of it is not uniform. The way these upgraded perceptions appear in consciousness differs quite radically.
Every one of them describes it differently.
For Litsch it’s an all pervasive sound, a haunting tone in the background of awareness. Ominous symphony hitting lull and crescendo based on proximity to relevant targets.
Mikaeli calls it an out of body experience, with a slight time delay against the arrow of time. Watching himself execute maneuvers full seconds before he feels the choosing.
Already-synesthesic Colten seefeels a tactile-color overlay corresponding to threat level. He says it’s kind of like what you get from tac glass “but deeper, more everywhere” on account of the proprioceptive component.
For Teo it’s none of that. Nothing particularly strange or interesting. No psychedelic trips. No spooky orchestras or timewarped 3rd person POVs. No cross-activation of visual cortex and postcentral gyrus corresponding to brightly colored topographic maps, felt as much as seen, floating in mind’s eye.
Just an intuition, a hunch.
Some of the techs have suggested a correlation between the aphantasia and an absence of the more ‘exciting’ integration qualia. If he can’t visualize when not networked, why should he when he is?
But whether due to a quirk of his hippocampus and occipital lobes, or something else, Teo doesn’t much care. Mere superhuman tactical insight has served him well enough, what’s it matter if it’s served plain without the garnish and dressing?
In fact he prefers it a mere feeling, anything more would be a distraction. He is content for his gut to simply tell him Beware! There be dragons, well-armed, ahead!
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They are threading a maze of shipping containers, suppressed fire echoing through the halls, when the alarm goes off.
As expected, it’s silent. Cartel security is nothing if not professional. Why let your enemy know that you know they’re here, when instead you can let a believed Element Of Surprise lull them into complacency? They aren’t even jamming radio yet.
What gives it away is the burst of coordinated activity throughout the compound: guard’s telltale pause as urgent radio chatter captures their attention, feigned nonchalance as they abruptly change directions, their pace far too brisk. Automated haulers retracting into loading bays, doors sealing. Seek & destroy drones quietly funneling out of scattered shipping containers. And one particular, seemingly ordinary, warehouse entrance with a suddenly very pronounced security presence.
It’s all subtle enough that you wouldn’t notice. Unless you happens to be the latest pattern-matching algo with eyes on every inch of the compound.
Their airborne herald feeds them the update—presence detected—and the team adjusts their plan accordingly, which is to say they don’t.
All it means is that things will get a little louder a little sooner than expected. The switch from subsonic will happen after that first crack echos through the compound, the first sentry finally managing to get a round off, or maybe the vwaaboom of the first exo they take out.
Whatever it might be, nothing is going to stop them. As impressive as the refinery’s security is, it’s all for naught, they don’t stand a chance.
They might as well be bringing a knife to a nuke fight.
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