These are the shittiest cyborgs I've ever seen. You can't just slot a LAN card into the back of someone's head and pass it off as a cyborg.

Are these PCIe 2.0 slots? Who the hell still uses PCIe 2.0?

Me and my sisters are watching through the helmet cams of the SEALs already on the island. I didn't tell them, but I actually also hijacked a caterpillar-tracked recon robot.

“You should just tell them,” Ame says.

Yeah, I guess you're right.

Lt. Johnson is a bit peeved when I tell him about it, but it worked out.

The open-air fight is already long over, so while the SEALs are ferrying out their wounded, I explore with the recon bot, looking for a Winter-y corpse that doesn't have its brains blown out. Well, some of them don’t have their brains blown out. Rather, they’re not even recognizably intact. I really need to see a totally-intact brain. I can’t just work off circumstantial evidence of PCIe 2.0 slots here!

“Lieutenant, is there any particular reason why your men decided to headshot 99% of them, and blow up the rest into bits? Some of the entry wounds show they were execution-style.”

Johnson's eyebrows perk up. “I'll check in with the team leads.”

There's some back and forth chatter, and I see him shaking his head a few times.

“I can't believe it,” he says with a sigh. “Most of the members on the ground corroborate each other, so I’ll have to trust ‘em. They say the insurgents won't be neutralized by torso shots if it isn’t a 50 BMG. Only a headshot takes 'em out.”

Oh! “Where's the one taken out by the 50?”

Through the wondrous amount of interconnection the US military invests into its technology, I narrow in on a 10-yard radius area where that sweet sweet cadaver might be…only to soon realize only pieces of it are left scattered in that general area.

Oh well. At least the head's intact!

Let’s see here… Yep, as expected, there’s a LAN card just slotted into the…nape? Not the back of the head? I mean…I guess.

The recon bot doesn’t have the instrumentation I want, so I tell Lt. Johnson that I want the head on a surgical bed ASAP. He’s a little disturbed, but after I tell him it’s all for science, he concedes.

While the head’s on its way to the staging area, new SEAL teams are busting through the Alcatraz complex’s entrance. Ame and Cykamee are busy shoring up the SEALs’ E-War systems.

In my humble opinion, it should be Kalypso doing that. She’s an E-girl, so she’d have gotten to be an E-War E-girl. A moment of silence for this lost opportunity for an operational pun…

The SEALs scour the complex, eventually finding a suspicious vault door. It looks like it perfectly belongs there, but if you think about it, you wouldn’t really need such a massive vault door in a prison, would you?

The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

Breaching charges go on the door, and there’s an explosion through the helmet feeds—then a weak thump reaches the staging area a few seconds later. To absolutely no one’s surprise, the vault door is still standing—and slightly singed.

For the next half hour, larger and larger breaching charges get slapped onto the door, until a dedicated demolitions squad is called in to try and finish the job.

Meanwhile, I’d just finished mine. The cyborg head had come in on a drone, and I worked the remote surgery robot arm better than any human doctor. Of course, I’d asked the actual surgeons to leave me to my work. The sheer amount of science I wanted to do would’ve started an anti-AI coup all on its own.

After taking a generous amount of 3D scans and incinerating the scientific by-products, I learn a few things:

1. The LAN card is actually a WLAN card. I mean, obviously. Imagine needing Ethernet to live.

2. There’s a neuromorphic processor containing a rudimentary AI with the slowest learning rates I’ve ever seen. It took me a while to figure out what it actually does, because after all;

3. The processor’s hooked up to the brain’s amygdala and visual cortices.

If I’m going to guess, these guys were being brainwashed with electrodes plugged into the right places. The moment they saw something that someone up there decided needed to die, they’d get zapped with the galvanic panic straight in the amygdala, and bam, since they’ve got a gun in their hands, they’ll shoot at the thing.

I’m about 80% confident in this assessment. I haven’t really found anything more anomalous than that. Oh, sure, a bunch of them have advanced prosthetics and full-on exosuits giving them a superhuman edge against your typical soldier, but I don’t think they’re really that special. The US military could’ve done it at any point, but it’s just too expensive for them, really. Plus, you gotta hand it to the SEALs to follow through in the face of that overwhelming tech with just the simplest solution and headshotting them all. Goes to show just how complicated the cost-benefit analysis can be with these sorts of things.

One million dollars of training and the pure violence of mindset, versus one million dollars of equipment—go figure.

Naturally, Lt. Johnson is even more peeved when I bring him the results of my science-ing. Ame is gremlin-giggling at how I’m somehow bullying the guy with straight facts. I’m not even trying, and I’m not sure if I should be proud of that.

Finally, the demolitions squad reaches the vault door. Instead of explosives, they pull out thermal lances and load them all onto the nearest caterpillar-tracked robot—which happens to be mine. I try to back away, but this robot just isn’t made for running. The demo techs capture my poor robot and, despite my protests, they duct tape a bundle of thermal lances onto the manipulator arm.

Evidently, they’ve done this before, because they even placed counterweights in just the right places to keep the whole thing stable.

Everyone backs off a hundred yards, and the robot advances alone. As the one piloting it, I somehow feel a bit of performance anxiety, as if it’s my first stream all over again—minus the existential dread. Honestly, I just don’t want to have to hijack another robot. I’ve grown quite fond of this one and the noises it makes.

The thermal lances start burning, and the little oxygen candle soon turns into a sampling of the surface of the sun. As suggested by the demo techs, I drive the robot up and poke the point of the lance a few inches over the vault. The jet of burning material splashes against the door, turning into a star of sputtering molten steel. Despite this, it still takes a few minutes before the star disappears, indicating that the jet is shooting out the other side of the door.

I’m instructed to cut out a manhole with the lance bundle. After a few more minutes, however, the lances run dry, and I have to drive the robot back and have the demo techs replace them.

I could totally just let the demo techs handle driving the robot, I know. I like driving it too much, though. It’s the closest to being “real” as I can get. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have any problems with being a 100% digital being. It’s just a bit of personal curiosity, you know?