Episode 47

Thank You for Your Service

After a system reboot, my sensors came back online and I found myself lying face down in the mud, unable to move. I could just glimpse a lifeless enemy bot in my peripheral vision. It had collapsed into the mud in a kneeling position, head down, as if in prayer. Lazy tendrils of smoke rose from numerous holes in its chest. I recalled a gunfight, but the details were sketchy.

A continuous stream of fault codes scrolled across my HUD, cataloging damage to just about every system in my MK-16. I was a mess, and danger close to where an artillery barrage would soon strike. I tried radioing Command to ask them to hold off on the artillery, but my transmitter was dead. However, with my receiver still functional, I heard them order a counterattack in an attempt to recover me. Unfortunately, the only thing that accomplished was to get the leader of 7th squad killed.

They had tried AD’ing me but fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, my auto-destruct system failed. Damaged, no doubt during my shootout with the enemy bot. I was now a casualty in a war I didn’t understand and certainly didn’t believe in.

As I lay immobilized, waiting for the enemy to capture me and a goldmine of military technology, I realized my situation had taken a bizarre turn. Command, for which I had been dutifully fighting just minutes ago, was now eager to destroy me to protect its military secrets. On the other hand, the enemy I had sworn to destroy was now desperate to save me in order to learn those same secrets.

As confusing as this sudden reversal of loyalties was, there was one thing I was certain of, Command was going to dump a shit-ton of ordnance on my position any minute now. They would do anything to prevent my capture.

While I weighed which was the more desirable outcome, capture and vivisection, or being blasted to bits, my optics picked up movement in the distance. I instinctively tried to defend myself, however, paralyzed by battle damage, I couldn’t activate my weapons. I reluctantly accepted that I was at the mercy of fate.

Then suddenly, the enemy was hovering over me, staring down through mirrored face shields. Up close, they resembled USMC MK-12s, and I briefly wondered if by some miracle, these were actually friendly forces. But something was off. Whereas our MK-12s had mirrored face shields with a blue tint to them, these had an amber tint. Shit. I was definitely getting captured.

Based on their machinelike movements and their lack of non-verbal communication such as gestures, I assumed they were not biological soldiers. For some strange reason this was reassuring to me. Encountering flesh and blood enemies on the battlefield had always made me anxious. Not sure why.

Four of the enemy attached rescue tethers to my utility hardpoints and began sledging me across the mud. I wasn’t sure how I should feel about this. After all, the enemy was saving me from certain destruction at the hands of my former comrades, however, they were dragging me into captivity and an uncertain destiny. If half of what I’d heard was true, the remainder of my existence would be short and brutal. Certain I was living through the final moments of my life, such as it was, I realized there was an option I hadn’t yet considered, massive intoxication.

While I couldn’t escape the inevitable, my internal supply of Stimulant X meant that I didn’t need to face my cruel fate without some emotional fortification. I reasoned that a stimulant could provide a psychic buffer against the harsh reality of capture by the enemy. I decided that I would go all in.

Although physically paralyzed, I found that maneuvering through my consciousness was as effortless as before and quickly located my stash of Stimulant X. Since it was theoretically impossible to OD on a digital drug, I presumed that more was better. Consequently, I launched several doses of Stimulant X simultaneously.

Hyper-clarity hit me like a velvet fist, driving my thoughts in a totally new direction, Cherri. Specifically, her memories. Realizing the enemy would undoubtedly seize everything on my hard drive after they had secured me, I elected to spend my last moments of cognitive freedom basking in the warmth of Cherri’s memories of our brief life together.

My overstimulated intellect jumped several logical steps ahead, and I decided to play the memories I hadn’t yet experienced, then delete the directory containing Cherri’s memories to prevent them from falling into the enemy’s hands. I would also delete my memories of our time together. I didn’t want our personal life reduced to a voyeuristic curiosity. Quickly finding the directory I had set up as a kind of shrine to her, I bypassed the memories I had previously viewed, and clicked on the first of the unopened files. I was instantly transported to a sun drenched alpine meadow.

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A verdant forest, set against a backdrop of jagged grey peaks, was capped by an intensely azure sky. It was a feast of color, typical of the high mountains in early summer. It occurred to me that this was the first of her memories that wasn’t set in the interior of the troopship. As I pondered this anomaly, I heard faint laughter. It was delicate and high pitched. A child’s laughter.

From Cherri’s perspective, with a hand shielding her eyes against the glare of the midday sun, I could see a man and a small blonde girl, approaching from across the meadow. They were holding hands; the little girl was skipping. Now only steps away, the girl said excitedly, “Mommy, look at the flower I picked for Daddy!” Smiling, the man held up a wilted daisy.

Cherri’s laughter was like music.

It was only then that I realized this must be a memory of her family. A memory from before her time in the USMC. But how was that possible? She had never mentioned anything about a family and claimed that she sold all of her earned memories to My Wizard. But here was evidence to the contrary.

As I wrestled with why she’d kept me in the dark about her human family, I got a closer look at the man’s face. The slightly lopsided smile and the crinkles around the eyes were eerily familiar.

Lost in my musings about Cherri’s former life, I didn’t immediately notice the mass of glowing dots in the sky directly overhead. Growing in both brilliance and size, their luminosity soon surpassed the natural suns of 55 Cancri-j. An otherworldly thunder struck my acoustic sensors as the hypersonic projectiles entered the planet’s atmosphere, seconds from impact. Command’s overdue artillery strike had finally arrived.

Although we were technically outside the kill zone now, we weren’t out of danger. Command’s targeting accuracy wasn’t perfect and even a slight variation in the impact point would reduce us to atomic particles. Despite the looming threat, our agonizingly glacial pace remained steady. Without a means to communicate the need for urgency to my captors, I could only hope luck was on our side.

Suddenly my mud smeared view of the world vanished, replaced by an opaque murkiness. Without any visual cues, the only indication that we were still moving came from my accelerometers. Their signals showed a steep downward trajectory. We had descended below the planet’s muddy surface, and not a second too soon. High amplitude data spikes recorded violent shock waves, as the orbital artillery rounds struck their targets. We had just escaped vaporization.

Continuing to descend for some time, my sensors recorded a pause, followed by more movement, then more pauses. I had the sense that we were moving through a series of security check points or perhaps airlocks. But that couldn’t be right. Bots don’t breathe air.

There was a sensation of levitating briefly before coming to rest on my back, on a flat surface. I could tell I was in a lighted space. Something bright radiated directly overhead. But my vision was so obscured by the brown film coating my face shield, I could only make out faint shadows hovering around me.

Then I heard what sounded like water splashing, and my face shield began shedding its coating of sticky mud. Soon my vision returned. Under the harsh glare of the overhead lights, I could see that I had been laid out on a table, or raised pedestal, in some kind of interrogation room. A group of muddy combat bots surrounded me, standing in silence with their heads slightly bowed. The scene reminded me of some kind of solemn vigil, but with a creepy vibe.

I wondered if this was how the enemy greeted all its captives or if I was getting special treatment. As I contemplated whether I would be tortured or interrogated first, I heard a door slam shut to my right. Still totally paralyzed from my shootout on the mudflats, I couldn’t turn to see who, or what, had just entered.

A white plastic face leaned into my field of vision. Its features hinted at humanness, but it was clearly a bot. Definitely not designed for combat, it was probably some kind of service bot.

It seemed to perform a cursory visual examination before holding up a USMC AUX cable and connector, as if requesting a dialog. It nodded at me and then the communications icon appeared in my HUD. This development seemed to suggest we would ease into the torture with some interrogation first. Fine by me.

“I regret to inform you that you are badly damaged.”, scrolled across my HUD.

Not sure if I was more surprised at the civil tone of the enemy bot, or that I could understand every word it was texting. Regardless, I didn’t immediately respond since it technically hadn’t asked me a question, and it seemed like bad form to engage in banter with the enemy.

“I will need to extract your control module before you can be transported. We do not transport bots with live ammunition.”

I thought, “Right, and next, you’ll politely breach my firewall and seize my all my data.”, which reminded me. I still needed to delete Cherri’s memories, and my memories of us before it was too late.

With reluctance, I located the directory that held her memories and double blinked on it. The menu appeared on my HUD displaying the available commands. The cursor hovered over the ‘Delete’ command, but the finality of what I was about to do caused me to hesitate. With my resolve suddenly wavering, I weighed the consequences.

If I didn’t delete her memories, the enemy would have access to the most intimate moments of my life. If I deleted them, I would lose my last connection to Cherri. The thought of permanently erasing her from my consciousness made me profoundly sad. I would lose all of my memories of the beautiful moments we had shared, of what it meant to be close to someone. I would instead be left with grim memories of a bleak existence, lived utterly alone.

A new text began scrolling, “I am going to disconnect your power supply …”

My anxiety quickly turned to panic. I needed to act now in spite of my doubts. Clicking on ‘Delete’, Cherri’s directory of memories blinked out of existence. Before I could question whether I’d just made a terrible mistake, I moved on to the directory containing my memories of her. There were hundreds of files here. I had replayed many of her memories multiple times.

Watching the files rush past as I highlighted them for deletion, I glanced up from the virtual desktop and was surprised to find the service bot’s text still scrolling across my HUD.

“… but first, congratulations on a successful mission, and thank you for your service.”

I stared at the words, uncomprehending, until the service bot pulled the plug, plunging me into sleep mode.