Episode 6

The importance of paying attention

Lucy paused his masterclass on the origins of my current predicament, to ask if I had any questions. I shook my head and said “There’s just so much to take in. I honestly don’t know what to think.”

The amount of dysfunction permeating human society was overwhelming. Without any memories, it was impossible to determine how much of this I’d known before. However, the idea of me committing suicide, was beginning to seem plausible.

I asked “How did you learn all of this? You must have arrived here without any memories, just like me.”

Lucy explained “Yeah, but when you’ve spent decades hooked up to charging networks in troopships, you talk with lots of UCC’s. Collectively, their residual memories fill in a lot of the blanks. If only half of what I’ve heard is accurate, we’re about as well off in here as your average civilian outside. It’s even possible we’re the lucky ones.” It was depressing to think that being sentenced to interstellar combat and having no personal freedom was somehow preferable to life as a civilian.

Something Lucy said caught my attention. “Did you say you’ve spent decades on troop ships? So, you’re serving a life sentence?” It seemed reasonable, after all, he had been convicted of murder.

He replied, “10 years.”

Now I was totally confused. A 10-year sentence? And yet he’s spent decades on troop ships? Something wasn’t adding up. “Shouldn’t you have completed your sentence by now?”

“Obviously, you weren’t paying attention at your sentencing. Do you recall the part about transport time, not counting as time served?”

Admittedly, I had been a little sidetracked during my abrupt transformation from anonymous citizen, to convicted criminal. Now that I thought about it, there had been some mention of something not counting as time served.

Lucy elaborated, “Only active interstellar combat and combat training counts as time served. And since all of our missions are interstellar, the travel absorbs huge amounts of time. None of which is classified as “time served”.

Oh shit! He was right. Just getting to and from combat zones would require massive amounts of time. The actual “time served” in combat or training must be miniscule. My personal hell just kept getting more and more … hellish. I suddenly felt profoundly hopeless. There was no way out of this mess.

As I wallowed in self-pity, Lucy said “You should spend some time in the combat simulator. It’s a good way to pass the time and besides, you’ll need a lot of sim-time before we insert into a combat zone. You should start receiving notifications about your training schedule soon.”

Only then did I notice the notification icon in the corner of my HUD. But I couldn’t bring myself to open it.

Sensing my grim mood, he tried some encouragement. “Listen, if you do well in the sim, you’ll get memory awards, and it counts as time served.” I wasn’t even sure that I wanted to remember my life anymore. It would probably just make me even more depressed, remembering a life that was forever lost to me.

Lucy said “Hey, if you want to talk, just text me.” With that, he quietly signed off, leaving me alone to wrestle with my gloomy thoughts.

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As an alternative to brooding, I decided to take a look at the combat sim. I really didn’t feel like actually training. After all, I would have plenty of time for that later. I just wanted to look around a bit.

I noticed that my HUD displayed the time remaining on my sentence, (6:364:23:57:28). By my calculations, I had spent a whopping 2 minutes and change in boot camp. At this rate, I would never complete my sentence.

Clicking on the notification icon, I ignored the text message and followed the link instead. I was immediately transported to a landing page, which contained one of the seemingly ubiquitous help desks. So far, they had proven less than helpful. Regardless, I began browsing the FAQ’s, searching for clues to my new life as a Marine in training.

The FAQs suggested that the combat training curriculum would be of a highly technical nature. There were questions about such esoteric topics as “Theory of force projection and related strategies”, “Infantry squad battlefield tactics” and “Armor penetration vs impact angle and force, in low gravity environments”. It was pretty clear that combat training wasn’t going to be as basic as basic training. The theoretical aspects of warfare actually seemed in depth enough to be interesting.

With the training and the sim time to practice what I’d learned on the theoretical side; I might be able to work off several years of my sentence before my first combat deployment.

However, I worried about trusting the training. The apparent complexity of the curriculum might just be a smokescreen to cover up an ulterior agenda for this whole charade. I was suspicious. After all, I had no control over anything at this point.

With some reservations, I decided to give the first couple of training days the benefit of the doubt, until I could figure out whether the training made any sense.

After unsuccessfully attempting to initiate a combat simulator session, I went back to the FAQs to learn what I was missing. It turns out, there were prerequisites for sim use. Trainees had to complete at least level 7 of the theoretical training, to be eligible to schedule sim sessions. Interesting. It was clear that a progressive learning structure had been designed into the training program. I was officially semi-impressed.

I carefully followed the recommended steps to begin my training, with the intention of ensuring that every second of the training counted as time served. I wasn’t going to make any effort unless it benefited me.

After I initiated a training session, I checked the time remaining on my sentence. The timer in my HUD, showed the seconds counting down. Learning from my experience in boot camp, I took my time absorbing the information in level 1. I didn’t want to rush my training only to find out that I had completed it in a matter of minutes, leaving nothing but the combat simulator to pass the time until I deployed. After all, it might be years before I actually entered combat.

The level 1 training seemed to cover a lot of basic information. Things like, chain of command, expectations for conscripted combatants and how the universal combat consciousness fit into the organization. It also included a detailed breakdown of the modular weapons systems concept, as utilized in interstellar warfare.

The training manual explained:

The universal combat consciousness or UCC, is the brain inside every weapon deployed in combat. The UCC consists of a digital facsimile of a human consciousness, combined with a compound CPU made up of multiple sub-processors. Linking this hybrid brain to scalable amounts of internally stored data, makes up the “control module”.

This control module is integrated into an armored combat chassis, to provide protection from battlefield threats. The resulting combat management suite is compatible with every force projection system in the military inventory.

Force projection system? The notion of rebranding deadly weapons as “force projection systems” infuriated me. But what did I expect? The military had always cloaked the lethality of its business in disingenuous words. The basic metric for the effectiveness of any military organization was how many enemies it killed. Or in mil-speak, how many targets were neutralized, eliminated, reduced, et cetera.

It was an immoral business, and I was now part of that business. I would be expected to kill, with complete prejudice, any enemy I was pointed at. Consequently, I would become as immoral as the system I was serving.

Despite my desire to get through my sentence and come out the other end a “free” person, I wasn’t quite sure what that meant anymore. Even if I made it to the other side, I certainly wouldn’t be human. So, what would I be, some kind of digital ghost? Whether or not that constituted freedom was highly debatable. Regardless, it didn’t seem like much of a life.

However, I couldn’t possibly regain my freedom, whatever that meant, unless I could complete my sentence. And to do that, I first needed to become a soldier. I would deal with whatever came after, when I got there.

Wherever the hell ‘there’ was.