“Let the great political force of the state be divided into two: the power of the government and the power of the people. Such a division will make the government the machinery and the people the engineer.” - Sun Yat-Sen from his speech “The Principle of Democracy” (1924)
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Feb 24, 2057, 0645 Hours (UTC +8)
Ladakh, India
Lādákè Forward Operating Base
Chen Jiahao sipped on a cup of strong coffee. Caffeine was one of the few substances that didn’t interfere with the pilot’s cocktail so he could have as much as he wanted before an operatio.
“Ahhh…” Chen said aloud.
Vocalizing his satisfaction usually made it deeper, but it was hard to feel any satisfaction within the swamp of pre-battle anxiety. Once he was shot up with the pilot’s cocktail it wouldn’t matter, but no matter how many operations he was a part of, the anxiousness never went away.
“You think we’ll break through today, Jiahao?” asked Hu Feng, aka Little Hu.
Little Hu was Chen’s best friend and fellow Xian pilot. The two had been found around the same time at the ages of 13 and 14 respectively. For years after he joined the United Chinese Army, Little Hu was treated with suspicion due to being Taiwanese, with the other pilots claiming that he would act selfishly in combat or that he thought he was better than them. But Chen Jiahao stood by Little Hu during those early years and as both rose to become two of the best Chinese pilots, the slander and gossip surrounding Little Hu slowly died away.
“We’ll see. It’s bad luck to predict the outcome of a battle. If you say you will win, you’ll lose. If you say you will lose, you’ll lose,” Chen replied, rolling the cup of coffee back and forth in his hands to warm them up. It was -15C outside and even with the heaters running the cold of the Ladakh mountain range still got inside the aluminum walls of the operating base.
“And what if I say it’ll be another stalemate?” Little Hu asked, grinning over the lip of his—Chen couldn’t fathom his preference—iced coffee.
“Then you’ll lose.”
“Ah, but if you say we’ll lose if I say it’s a stalemate, then aren’t you also saying we’ll lose, in which case you are the one causing us to lose?”
“No, I’m saying you will lose, Little Hu, probably blown up in a fiery blaze like in a main melody movie,” he said.
“Oh yeah! That’s how I’d like to go,” Little Hu said with a laugh. “In a big boom.”
“Please don’t say things like that,” said Yang Anming.
Chen Jiahao hadn’t heard Yang enter the pilots’ lounge. He expected her to take longer in the shower, but here she was, suited up for battle in the standard-issue green-and-red jumpsuit.
Her clothes matched Chen and Little Hu, but her figure was slender and delicate beneath the form-hugging pilot suit. Unlike in her media appearances, her skin was neither jade white nor unblemished, with splotches of acne on her gold cheeks, and her lips were not the color of ripe pomegranates but cracked and purplish from the cold, dry air of the Kashmiri mountains. However, it was precisely because this was the real Yang Anming, the side that the cameras of the Propaganda Department were not permitted to show, that Chen Jiahao’s heart fluttered at the sight of her.
“Sorry, Sister Yang, but it eases the nerves to talk about horrible things before battle, right Jiahao?”
“Hmm? Ah—” Chen found himself in the unfortunate position of having to side either with the girl he was attracted to, or his best friend. He took another sip of coffee to hide his blush and decided the best course of action was to choke on it to divert the conversation. “—Ack! Hot! Ow!”
“Oh no! Are you alright, Chen Jiahao?” Yang Anming asked.
“Ahhh…” Chen said, audibly savoring her concern in a way that sounded like he was clearing his throat. “I’m alright, Sister Yang, just drank with the wrong pipe.”
Yang sighed. “Please stay focused.”
Already Chen felt better about the coming battle. In a way, he almost wanted to avoid taking the pilot’s cocktail so that he could continue riding the emotional roller coaster. The concentrating effects of the cocktail were necessary for improving combat ability, but the focus came at the cost of dulling everything else, including the pleasure of Yang Anming’s concern.
From the hallway outside the lounge came an aggressively loud yawn. A moment later, Chen Xinyue entered the room, still in her pajamas and slippers and wrapped in her cot blanket.
“Coffee? Where?” she asked bluntly.
Despite being the oldest of their cohort at 25, Chen Xinyue was a runt at a whopping 150cm. Even with the smallest jumpsuits that logistics had in stock she still had to pin back the cuffs, and the requisition request for a custom tailored jumpsuit had been in the works for over two years. At the coffee station Xinyue resembled a kid begging her parents to try the grown-up drink. Though, it was a dangerous thing to call Chen Xinyue a kid, as some in the media had discovered.
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“I made a pot,” Chen Jiahao said, gesturing at the coffee maker next to the microwave.
Chen Xinyue grunted and poured it out as black as petroleum into an oversized mug and crawled up on the lounge sofa with her knees drawn up and used the coffee as a combined heat and energy source.
“We’re deploying in half an hour,” Yang said.
“I’ll be ready,” replied Chen Xinyue. “I go at my own pace.”
“Yeah, and we all go at your pace too, Chen Xinyue,” Little Hu said.
“You’re damn right you do. Listen to your big sister,” the small woman replied.
Chen Xinyue was not related to Chen Jiahao, with the former being from Guangdong Province and the latter from Beijing. Ordinarily, the United Chinese Army would have placed them into separate teams to prevent this sort of thing, but the cohort system superseded that consideration. Both Chens, Little Hu, and Yang Anming had all been discovered at the same time and at roughly the same ages (with Little Hu, the youngest, being three years younger than Chen Xinyue) during the Second National Pilot Discovery Campaign. As such, they worked, ate, and slept together as a unit for nine years under the supervision of an older, non-Pilot commander, Li Yuxuan.
Five minutes after Xinyue’s arrival, that very same commander, a middle-aged man with the good fortune to go gray with a full set of hair and firm skin, walked into the room in service uniform and spotted the pilot who was not in hers.
“Pilot Chen Xinyue, you are twenty minutes from deployment, why are you not in uniform?” asked Commander Li.
“Oh?” Xinyue said, looking down at her toes peeking out from the blanket she was wrapped up in. “Ah, so I’m not. Apologies, Commander. I’ll be right back.”
Commander Li chuckled as Chen Xinyue dashed off to change. He’d been their cohort’s CO since the four of them were discovered, and they had seen more of Li than their own parents as they came of age. Only the formality of military service kept them from calling him Uncle Li, though the formal titles they all used were tongue-in-cheek. The pilots said “commander” with the same casual tone one might say “uncle,” and Li used the term “pilot” as though he were saying “xiao” or “little.” The rules were different for other commanders and pilots in the TOCU regiment, but within their cohort there was an unspoken homeostasis of formal and informal, requiring no explanation for the four pilots and their commander.
Once Chen Xinyue returned in uniform and gulped down the remaining half pint of coffee, Commander Li led the four pilots outside under the enormous adaptive-camouflage tarp. Metal poles formed a skyscraper-size frame tall enough to hold the waving tarp of micro-LEDs displays aloft over the heads of four, 40m tall Type-49 Theater Operations and Control Units and the complex of barracks erected to house the platoons of support people required to keep them running. Were it not for the adaptive camouflage projecting the appearance of nondescript snowy mountainside, the TOCUs would show up as crimson bullseyes on Indian satellite surveillance.
Technicians and engineers bundled up in cold-weather gear scrambled about the staging ground in purposive chaos like a transition between dance numbers. Enormous hoses filled the TOCUs with jet fuel and were sealed and pulled away as mobile scaffolding towers rolled into place for the pilots to enter. Right up until the moment Chen Jiahao climbed into the cockpit, engineers were still loading drums of 40mm grenades and belts of 12.7mm bullets into the armament chambers. Meanwhile, the MHTK and multi-role missiles had been loaded the night before, but the last diagnostics were run as Chen situated himself.
The cockpit of his Type-49 TOCU, whose name was the UCU Laozi, felt like a second home to Chen. Or perhaps like a hometown, but one of those hometowns that no longer existed anywhere along the seamless Megalopolis of the Chinese Eastern seaboard. He himself had grown up in Beijing which, as a city of the world and the Human Race, could never be a “hometown,” not even at the level of a city block. Chen’s cockpit, however, was the kind of home Li Bai bowed his head to.
The standing harness was not particularly comfortable, the information scrolling across the heads-up display was confusing, and the controls were unintuitive, even to the select few humans whose brains could handle the integration process. But when the harness slipped over his shoulders it embraced him like a warm hug. Chen slotted himself and his brain into this cold, harsh machine and when he did so it became organic. He felt the innate humanness which adhered to all human-shaped things and his consciousness grew outside of itself, expanding to fill this new vessel from its metallic shell down to the network of computers and wires which formed the many neurons and synapses of its nervous system.
Chen nestled into the standing harness, pulling his arms and legs through the restraints that would keep him secure in the event of a fall or damage to the TOCU’s appendages. Sensing his presence, the nervous system of the great machine thrummed and brought the EEG cap forward, allowing him to adjust at his convenience until the subdural connectors aligned with the surgically-implanted crescent of copper nodes above and behind his left ear. When the subdural connectors and pilot’s cocktail needle pressed into the copper implants, he would experience full integration.
Once this happened, Chen would cease to experience himself as a man. The same areas of the brain which perceived him as a separate entity would map directly onto the TOCU unit. He would, in effect, become the UCU Laozi. But even before full integration, the EEG cap hooked him into the network of commander and pilots.
“Good morning, pilots, this is Commander Li running an integration check,” said a voice in Chen’s head.
It was hard to describe exactly how he knew this voice was Commander Li (apart from its having said so), as the “voice” was felt rather than heard. But Chen could tell who was speaking with the same surety he knew his hand would move if bidden.
“This is UCU Laozi, reporting ready,” Chen thought.
“This is UCU Huineng, reporting ready,” said Little Hu.
“This is UCU Huiban, reporting ready,” said Yang Anming.
“This is UCU Qinqiu, reporting ready,” said Chen Xinyue.
Elsewhere, Chen Jiahao felt a tiny heart pounding with caffeine, a smooth nail scratching against the shoulder padding, a tooth nibbling the inside of a lip, and the slimy gel of an EEG cap working its way through a head of salt-and-pepper hair.
“Initial diagnostics complete. Beginning integration process,” Commander Li said.
There was a metallic whine and Chen Jiahao felt the knock of the subdural connectors against his scalp. The last thing he felt before his consciousness dissolved into the TOCU and he gave himself over to the opaque stretch of time called the “operation period” was the prick of the pilot’s cocktail needle. Warmth, then chilly coldness, then warmth again rushed into his veins and catapulted him out into the dark of the Kashmiri pre-dawn. Snow fell gently into the fringes of the giant camouflaged tent and onto the frigid titanium plates of the UCU Laozi.