Star Strike

The feeling that he belonged had just taken a major boost skyward, of course. The nano injected into his system on 0710 had grown into standard-Corps issue cereblink hardware, and now, for the first time in three months, he was again connected.

It had been a rough time without connections—no downloads, no direct comm. Or, rather, downloads and incoming comm messages had entered his brain via his ears and his eyes, without mediation or enhancement by AI software. It had been like starting all over again, learning how to learn, rather than allowing headware and resident AIs to sort and file his memories for him.

He had a new personal electronic assistant, too … or, rather, a Corps platoon EA guide he shared with everyone else in the company. The EA’s name was Achilles; Warhurst had told them to think of him as a kind of narrowly focused platoon sergeant. Achilles was a bit short in the personality department, but the system was very fast, very efficient, and was working hard at its first task, helping him learn how to get the most out of the new headware.

Later, at evening chow, he discovered one down side to Achilles.

“So, whatcha think of the new headware?” he asked Sandre Kenyon, a recruit who’d been born and raised in one of the new arcologies off the coast of Pennsylvania. She’d been a vir-simmer, a programmer of simulation AIs, before she’d joined the Corps. He followed her out of the chow line and toward a couple of empty seats at one of the tables. Noise clattered and echoed around them; meals were among the very few times when recruits were free to socialize with other recruits, at least after the first month of training.

“It’s okay, I guess,” she said. “It’s gonna take some getting used to, though.”

“I know. It’s so damned fast. …”

“It’s also damned creepy,” she told him.

“What do you mean?”

“Having your platoon sergeant perched on your shoulder every minute of every day? Watching everything you do? Even everything you think? And reporting it all back to HQRTC, complete with images in glorious color and infrared? I don’t know about you, Aiden, but there are a few things I do or think about doing that I don’t care to share with half the base, y’know?”

“Oh …”

He’d not thought about that aspect of things, at least not before now.

In fact, privacy was an alien concept in boot camp. Male and female recruits trained together, shared the same barracks, and used the same head. Toilets had stalls but no doors, and no recruit was ever really alone for more than a few moments at a time. In fact, come to think of it, standing barracks fire watch in the middle of the night was probably the closest any recruit came to having some private time—but then you never knew when the sergeant of the guard was going to show up on one of his rounds.

Mostly, it wasn’t a hardship. The recruits were too damned busy, moving at a flat run from reveille to taps every day, for it to be a problem … and most human cultures accepted casual social nudity as the norm.

“Is Achilles listening to you gripe about it now?”

She shrugged. “I asked it. It told me it monitored everyone in the company for breaches of regulations and compliance to orders … but that it didn’t record or transmit anything else. It … it’s a machine. A program, rather, so I guess it shouldn’t bother me. Still … how do we know?”

Garroway began digging into his meal—a nanassembled steak indistinguishable in taste and texture from live steaks culture-grown in the Ring agros. One thing you had to say about the Marines: they fed well.

He assumed Sandre was talking about sex. Technically, fraternization between recruits was forbidden, though in fact the authorities didn’t seem to pay much attention to occasional and harmless breaches of the rules. If a recruit on fire watch was caught in the rack with a fuck buddy, they both would probably be bounced out of the Corps and back to Earth or wherever they’d come from so fast their eyes would be spinning in their heads, but Garroway knew that several recruits in Company 4102 were enjoying one another’s physical companionship—at least if their break-time war stories could be believed.

His only question was how they found the time—or the energy—with the daily schedule that ruled their lives—up at zero-dark thirty, followed by eighteen hours of marching, drilling, classroom work, lectures, testing, and downloading, with lights out at 2200 hours.

Having a personal daemon was nothing new. Most humans had them, the only hold-outs being the various neoluddite or neoprimitive cultures which had abandoned high-tech for religious, esthetic, or artistic reasons. Achilles was a daemon, nothing more. In fact, he seemed just like Aide, except that he was more powerful, faster, and he linked all of the recruits in Company 4102 into a close-knit electronic network.

But he had to admit that Sandre had a point. Having Achilles watching him was just like having Warhurst watching him, except that the watching was taking place every second of every day. His stomach tightened at the thought.

“Recruit Kenyon is correct,” a voice whispered in his mind.

Garroway looked up, startled. “Achilles?”

“What?” Sandre asked. Garroway hadn’t realized he’d spoken the name aloud. He waved his hand back and forth, requesting her silence.

“Affirmative,” the voice continued. “Think of me as a part of yourself not as a spy for your superiors.”

But you do report to the DI shack, don’t you? This time, Garroway thought the question silently, employing the mindspeak he’d always used with Aide.

“Technically, yes, but only in matters involving gross negligence of duty. In any case, Marines are supposed to be of superior moral character. By this point in your training, those with serious moral flaws have already been weeded out.”

“Oh …”

Company 4102 had dwindled a lot in the past few weeks, it was true. Only forty-five recruits remained out of the over one hundred who’d originally mustered at Noctis Labyrinthus. But he’d assumed the DORs—the Drop Out Requests—had quit because they couldn’t get along without their headware.

“That is a large part of it,” Achilles agreed. “One aspect of moral character is the ability to rely on yourself rather than on technology.”

Carefully, Garroway took another bite of faux steak and chewed, thoughtful. Achilles seemed to be a bit more dominant than Aide had been. And the damned thing was reading his thoughts, rather than waiting for him to encode them as mindspeak.

“You will simply have to learn to trust me, Garroway,” Achilles told him. “Trust that I am not sharing your thoughts with others.”

“Unless I deserve it.”

“Do you always talk to yourself?” Sandre asked him.

Achilles, tell her I’m holding a conversation with you.

A moment later, Sandre’s eyes grew very large. “Did you send that?”

He nodded. “Pretty slick, huh?”

“Damn it, Garroway!” she snapped. “Get out of my head!” Abruptly, she stood, picked up her tray, and walked away. Garroway considered calling to her, but decided that using telepathy would just make matters worse.

They were all going to have to work with the new technology for a bit, in order to get used to it.

Exactly, Achilles told him. He could have sworn the AI sounded smug.

Married Enlisted Housing

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