They’re taking our brains! They want to turn us all into zombies, man. You think you’re in charge of the chips they put into your eyes, but really you don’t have any control. Once they do the implant, you’ll be nothing but a corporate drone.
And now the Army wants to put them into every member. They say it’s to let them coordinate better and communicate. They call it Combat Information Logistics Synchronization. But that’s just what they want you to think. The real name is Corporate Idiots and Living Slaves. No way am I going to be putting one of those in my eye.
--Tim Reilly, Street Preacher June 2034
And in breaking news, popular activist and street preacher Tim Reilly has been found coming out of the KOIN tower today sporting a stylish new second-generation Ocular Augment. Apparently the rumors are true that his street preaching campaign, popular with thousands, was nothing more than a marketing ploy by chip and computer manufacturer Nytel.
Identification of the public person was slowed down due to the implant hiding key features, but insiders were able to provide DNA evidence of the matchup.
Reilly, who has not been seen for several months, was not available for comment.
--The Daily Oregonian. September 2036
***
“...In the right place at the right time,” he completed my mantra. “Captain, you may not know that Xenovir is an instructor at Threat Dynamics. I recall you were absent for that rotation? He’s the most precise shooter I’ve ever seen. If he wants to play William Tell, I’ll sign up in a heartbeat.”
The captain deflated a bit, unable to stay angry in the light of his own man’s endorsement. “Well, why didn’t you say so?” He huffed and turned away.
But I had my own concerns to raise. “Just a second, Captain, I’m not done here. I got left in the middle of the field with my pants down. Why didn’t you warn me of the ambush and the plan?” The near miss had scared me, and I wanted to find out why I was being left out.
“What do you mean? There wasn’t any warning; we reacted on the fly.”
[“He’s right.”] Ginny agreed. [“You’re the only one that saw the trapdoor. And they spotted the forest ambush at the same time Tara did. Corie, show him the video.”] In my visor a window opened showing an overview of the field with the company walking along it. In the video, I could pick out my own reaction to the trapdoor a split second before the antithesis appeared in the tree line. The troopers hesitated several seconds before turning with drill team precision to push through the antithesis and into the forest.
I raised my eyebrows. “Was that a prepared response then? I didn’t hear any orders about the charge.”
“It was on comms and CILS. You should be in there,” he said dismissively. After a glance to the side, his jaw twitched as he subvocalized, and a scowl crept over his expression. “Sergeant Teia says that you were issued the standard invite but haven’t joined the company net.”
“I don’t recall any invite. Corie? Did you see it come in?” I tapped my ear as a sign that I was on a call.
--You did get several garbled data streams, but they didn’t link up. Oh, I see. Is this using the MilNet protocol?
“Was that on MilNet?” I asked the captain while mentally kicking myself for not thinking of the battle net. How could I forget the dense data stream soldiers were expected to handle? It was my inability to handle that data that had blocked my childhood dream. I’d been so busy playing soldier that I hadn’t realized that I was missing the tool that let them operate as a single unit.
The captain again subvocalized for a few minutes, and soon a sergeant with a large backpack walked up. “Captain says you have some questions about the battle net invite?” Her name badge read Teia.
“I didn’t get anything intelligible. My AI is asking if it was using MilNet?”
She nodded. “That’s standard with civilians. It’s due to compatibility and the Didir protocols. Even the latest data channels on civie Augs won’t handle all we need. They have to use legacy frequencies to supplement.” She shrugged in a “what can you do?” manner.
The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
--That explains it. Your hind-brain can’t receive those older radio frequencies. I didn’t think that legacy connectivity would matter.
--With enough points, anything’s possible.
I paused with a flat look on my face and a sigh. As everyone around me shuffled nervously, I looked up at the sky and asked out loud, “How expensive will this be?”
--Twenty points will get you a basic connection, similar to what state-of-the-art terestrial augs have. However, you might want more than that. Tara’s trying to keep her drones out of the way of the military, but it’s wasting time and attention. A better transceiver will allow more bandwidth, which can be used for full net integration. That will let her sync with the troop’s dronists so they can support each other.
--One hundred points. You’d still come out ahead after this little scuffle.
“Hang on a sec, I have a solution coming.” I said. A small disk appeared in my open hand, along with the fogger canister, which dropped into the mud. “Oops, I forgot about that.” I looked around and saw that most of the troopers were holding a perimeter, while a few collected antithesis into piles. “You can leave these bodies to me. This fogger should get them all. But we don’t want to be here when it goes off. Once I install this upgrade, we can start moving again.”
--Press the disk against your neck, towards the back. It’ll self-install from there.
I did as she asked. The disk was cold against my skin, then the area pricked with several pinpoints of pain, which quickly passed. Right on its heels came a creepy twitching feeling all over my scalp and down my spine. I wiggled in response until it settled down.
“Something wrong?” Carlson asked.
“No. Some of the upgrades we get feel creepy while they are installing. We’re good to go. I should be ready to connect in…”
--Two minutes.
“A couple minutes,” I finished with hardly any pause. “Until then, I can stay by the sergeant?”
“Yes. We’ve lost too much time to this clusterfisk. Fall in and head out.” Carlson stared at Martin for a bit, their jaws working, and, as the half-company started moving again, one of the privates came and walked nearby. We trekked on, leaving behind a growing fog of enzyme dissolver.
A few minutes later, I could tell the new upgrade had activated. Suddenly, I felt vibrations running over me from head to heel, as if I’d touched a battery terminal. Some instinct from my hind-brain identified them as different radio frequencies. They played up and down me in a low-level cacophony like a thousand radio stations all playing at the lowest level, all at once.
With a little concentration I could focus on individual frequencies: the long low droning of the lower bands, the chittering of the higher ones, and even the shrill buzz of the highest bands where augs and cellphones did their digital dance of data.
My hind-brain seized some of them, teasing out the digital signal hidden in the waveform, which it processed as voice, video, or data. Most of them, however, just made irritating noise. The sensations annoyed me at first, until it all faded out and joined the background of my awareness, like how my shirt rubbed on my ribs as I walked. Still there, but only noticed when something odd happened with it.
“There you are,” Teia said. She pulled out a half-sized tablet, tapped some commands on it, and soon I had a ping of introduction. I accepted the ping, and a new app reached out to my hind-brain. Soon I had a rush of data coming in. A new map appeared with location data for all the troopers and drones, along with piles of chat channels and mountains of voice comms.
“Oh, you have full connectivity? Not sure how you got theater-level access—that’s higher than I have—but I’m sure you’ll figure out what to do with that. Not sure I’d want that much info to sort through, myself.” The sergeant seemed to be monitoring my connection.
I soon understood what she meant. Hundreds of text and voice feeds, at multiple ranks, all clamored for my attention. Beeping notices of text alerts and the constant chatter of voices jerked my attention to and fro. Several of the feeds related to the movement of the armored vehicles of the main army, along with movements of the troops, and accounting of all the fuel being consumed in live updates. In my visor, icons and data tags buried the troopers with digital information and trivia.
“If you have any questions about what the data means, Torkan here can straighten you out.” She nodded at the man standing nearby. The topmost tag on him talked about a certification status on social diseases.
The information overload was staggering at first, but Torkan made some suggestions about which were the most important channels and which could be muted or ignored, and also how the map icons worked. I surprised him by setting up a private channel with him for both text and voice, and again when Ginny and Tara joined in.
“That’s not supposed to be possible. I’m sure it’s a breach of some regs,” he said, shifting uncomfortably.
“They’re technically not in CILS.” I said truthfully. I’d used my hind-brain to set up a virtual echo between the CILS data and the team conference. “I’m relaying a separate conference in both directions. Internal to CILS, it should all register as me.”
Closing down the unnecessary voice channels first let me concentrate. The drone-ops data was subdivided out for Tara with assistance from Corie. Then we limited the VR icons down to the minimum of name, weapon, and ammo. I pared the chats down to the local command team. And finally, we merged the map data with my active mini-map.