Feb 20, 2057, 0741 Hours (UTC +8)

Ladakh, India

Zoji La Pass

Chen Jiahao had been black-out drunk only once in his life and he had no desire to repeat it. However, being under the pilot’s cocktail was like being blacked out in one specific way: He would not remember anything he did while piloting, and he was aware of that fact in the present moment. This moment, crunching through the snowfields near Zoji La Pass, was nothing but a dream he was currently living in.

“No man’s land starts at the bend up there, 1.2km northwest. The Indians have positions on both mountainsides. Even attacking this early, they’ll have birds in the air within 15 minutes. That’s what we want,” said Commander Li through the neural network. “Your main objective is to draw attention away from our boys in the 52nd brigade. The more force the Indians bring for you, the less they’ve got for them. Your secondary objective is to come back in one piece.”

The pilots had been given this same briefing yesterday, but now it was the giant, rumbling TOCUs who were listening.

“Let’s go 2-and-2,” Chen said. “Little Hu and I will focus on anti-material damage, Sister Yang and Chen Xinyue on SAM defense.”

The other three voices gave an affirmative while Commander Li remained silent. Tactical decisions were up to pilot initiative, and despite the slowness and delay the word “democracy” implied, the decisions followed the principles of Centralist Democracy. Once at least one other pilot affirmed a decision, the other two were obligated to follow. In nine years this system had never failed. Thus, Commander Li’s role was instead to feed them the broader strategic picture.

“Chatter on the encrypted bands. They hear you coming,” Commander Li said.

“Sending out a probe,” Chen Xinyue said.

From a silo in the UCU Qinqiu’s shoulder, a tiny reconnaissance drone flew out into the mountain air. The sensitive external instruments of the four TOCUs dimmed the ambient sound of the mountain and amplified the gentle, 20db hum of the drone in proportion. The Indians had similar technology to amplify oscillatory frequencies, so this was to hear what they were hearing. The TOCUs, however, were also able to see the low-observable drone as it pinged back to them and marked its after-image in red.

“Turning the corner in three, two, one…”

The drone flew around the bend in Zoji La pass and hovered in an evasion pattern as it scanned the mountainside. It took around a minute for the Indians to notice its presence in the pre-dawn darkness, but the drone was soon met with reports of small arms fire from attempts to shoot it down. These were neither undisciplined, nor irrational attempts to kill it, though they were futile. The soldiers guarding the mountain pass knew exactly what the little drone was doing: Marking their positions. It didn’t even require muzzle flashes. The irregularities wrought by humanity’s intrusion into the landscape were analyzed by artificial intelligence and translated instantly onto the 3-dimensional map stored in the TOCUs’ memory.

“We’ve got them,” Chen Xinyue said, synchronizing her updated map with her fellow pilots’.

It was unnervingly like a video game, Chen Jiahao thought. Golden outlines showed him exactly where in the mountains the Indian army had dug in, and probability models showed him with 85% likelihood what these positions would look like underground. Though it was far from perfect information, the fog of war had been almost entirely removed from the mountains in the span of a minute. His “quest” had been updated.

“Let’s go, Jiahao!” Little Hu said.

The two TOCUs in front began pounding through the snow that blanketed the Srinagar–Leh Highway, gyros and micro-pitons hissing as they fought the snow for control of the robots’ momentum. Anticipating the ordnance pointed at the bend in the pass, the two pilots prepped their afterburners. The moment they were within the line of sight of the first pair of hidden bunkers, their afterburners flared, banishing the snow underneath the two TOCUs and bringing an early dawn to the mountain pass.

Lifted into the air by thousands of gallons of jet fuel, the enormous robots remained suspended by something called a DZC drive, or as the pilots called it, the “duanzi-cao.” Neither they nor their commanders knew what the DZC did to suspend 40 tons of titanium in the air. Like the American fusion engine, the Chinese “levitation machine” as the media called it was the highest level of state secret. That it worked, however, nobody could deny, least of all Chen Jiahao and Little Hu feeling the stomach-churning sensation of the drive’s artificial zero-G, and the Indian artillerists who blew giant holes into the highway at the exact spot cleared by the afterburners.

“I get north slope, you get south,” Little Hu said.

“Roger that,” replied Chen Jiahao.

The UCU Laozi raised its left fist towards the glowing yellow bunkers in the Kashmiri mountainside. As the aiming reticle stopped on the first bunker, Chen saw little black ants vomit from its mouth. He felt two strange sensations at the sight: First, a sense of wrongness and guilt, and a strange connection with these little black ants resembling the connection he shared with his fellow pilots. The second sensation was a dulling of the first.

Attraction and repulsion. These were the two fundamental directions in a universe with only relational coordinates. All of human history was nothing but these directions and the forces that drove them. Attraction brought Chen and his TOCU together, his TOCU and his squadron, his squadron and the Unified Chinese Army, the Unified Chinese Army and the Chinese Democratic Centralist Party. The CDCP and Chinese civilization. And here was Chen Jiahao, one cell of one organ of that great civilization-scale entity.

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

Chen asked himself what these little black ants fleeing down the mountainside and cowering in their bunkers were, and a voice not unlike his teammates and commander whispered back, “they are foreign bodies.”

The 40mm grenade cannon spooled up. A second later, explosions from propelled grenades shook the snow from trees and the rocks from cliffs and the Earth trembled, sealing the bunker and extinguishing the golden outline on Chen’s display. He brought his right hand up, palm facing outwards, and swept it across the mountainside and a buzzsaw drone announced the presence of an invisible specter depositing 12.7mm holes in these foreign bodies.

One-by-one, Chen Jiahao and Little Hu destroyed the marked bunkers as the three-minute duration on their DZC drives ran out and they drifted to the ground.

“Pushing the drone forward,” Chen Xinyue said.

“Any sign of aerial deployment?” Chen Jiahao asked.

“Nothing yet,” replied Commander Li. “But don’t relax yet.”

Once the initial bunkers were cleared and there were only a handful of harmless black ants scrambling in the snow which were not worth wasting ammunition on, the UCU Huiban and the UCU Qingqiu caught up with their brother units. The drone moved up the snowed-over highway. Outside of a couple of hastily abandoned artillery positions, they met no opposition.

“There’s no resistance, Commander. The Indians committed barely anything here,” Chen Jiahao reported.

Commander Li’s response came after a several second delay. “Hold there. I’m going to discuss this with regional command.”

The four pilots didn’t bother to speculate about what was happening. They wouldn’t remember anything anyway once the post-mission memory loss set in. Nonetheless, it was strange. Bad intel was nothing new, but leaving open a key highway into Srinagar, and thus the approach into the entire gangetic plain, was not what either the pilots or regional command had planned for.

Before Commander Li returned with new orders, Chen Xinyue’s probe detected the distant but approaching rumble of jets. Its onboard AI classified them as low-observability strike fighters. Their number between three and seven.

“Strike birds, coming fast,” Chen Xinyue said.

“Can you two pick them off? Our DZC drives are recharging,” Chen Jiahao replied.

“We’ll try,” replied Sister Yang, whose thoughts on the bad fortune of predicting victory were the same as Chen Jiahao’s.

The jets had not been picked up by Chinese radar and Commander Li was absent from their neural network. The four pilots were left to their own initiative.

“Little Hu, I’ve got a bad feeling. Let’s both climb further up the mountain,” Chen Jiahao said.

“Isn’t it unmanly to leave the girls by themselves?” Little Hu replied.

“We’ll be fine. We still have our DZC drives,” Sister Yang said.

With at least two affirming voices this rendered Jiahao’s recommendation an order and Little hu complied. The jet rumbling increased and became audible to the TOCUs on-board instruments as the UCU Laozi and UCU Huineng marched up the Kashmiri mountainside. Trees and rocks snapped under their colossal feet or were speared on the micro-pitons rippling along their soles. They had ascended roughly 400 meters before a wing of five strike jets ripped overhead.

Suddenly, Zoji La pass screamed with noise. Target acquisition software flicked on for the two anti-air TOCUs and brilliant lines of flashing red—one red streak for every five invisible ones—spewed from the 20mm cannons in their palms. Two of the flashing red lines sliced through jets in the front of the formation and they burst into flames. Before being downed, all five fired their missiles.

The two Chinese TOCUs launched interceptor missiles. These interceptor missiles, calibrated to hit and kill air-to-ground missiles aimed directly at a TOCU unit, missed and disappeared into the dark as the barrage from the Indian jets burst not against the TOCUs, but against the mountainside.

“Afterburners!” Chen Jiahao screamed through the neural network. Or perhaps it had been Little Hu. Or one of the two women. It made no difference, as consensus was reached simultaneously.

Snow, mud, and rock careened down the mountain. Switching to manual injection, the UCU Laozi dumped a carefully-rationed portion of its fuel into its afterburners and lifted over the small avalanche. The UCU Huiban and UCU Qinqiu did likewise while switching on their DZC drives, slowing their descent and allowing them to face the jets now attempting to retreat. Another round of rotary cannon fire downed two before the third escaped over the mountain range.

The UCU Laozi plunged back to Earth and emitted a scream of tortured metal as its shock absorbers held their ground against 40 tons of pressure. With great relief, Chen Jiahao saw no critical warnings flash across his screen. The first wave of the avalanche missed, the inertia of the TOCU’s weight was able to keep it upright against the deluge.

The other three pilots heard a louder crunch and clatter of metal and then a sound like gunshots as the their brother unit, the UCU Huineng, blew out its shock absorbers. Unable to stay upright, the UCU Huineng crashed to the ground and the avalanche piled up over it. The other three pilots felt phantom sensations of jarring whiplash.

“Little Hu!”

They knew immediately it would be impossible to dig him out until the avalanche ran its course. Fortunately, after a few terrifying seconds of neurological silence, Little Hu finally said, “I’m okay. Went dark for a second, but I’m okay.”

Commander Li cut in. “The bulk of the Indian 72nd division have been diverted to meet our ground force north of here. Little Hu, you will switch to low-power mode, privileging environmental control, and wait until we can reinforce the pass and dig you up. There should be enough on-board oxygen for at least 24 hours and we have your position marked on the map. The rest of you will leave Little Hu behind and cut through the mountain to reinforce the 52nd and help them break through the enemy line. Understood?”

A sense of unease at the directive to leave their comrade behind traveled through the network of pilots, but after a couple of seconds, Chen Jiahao felt a warmth and then a cold and then a warmth again in his neck and it didn’t seem to matter. They were live cells of the greater organism and Little Hu was an injured cell. Though none of the three liked the decision, the process of democracy had played out in concentric rings of consensus above their head, beginning with President Wu in the center and rippling out to the regional command Commander Li had conferred with, and now it was the pilots’ turn to fulfill their role. They couldn’t only think of themselves, but the billions of Chinese whose hope they carried.

“Affirmative,” all three thought at once.