War Machine: The Memoirs of a Synthetic Marine

Episode 5

No justice in the system

I decided to take advantage of Lucy’s tribal knowledge and find out more about my new life as a convicted soldier. Starting with some small talk, I asked Lucy how he had ended up in the Marines.

“Well, pretty much everyone in the military these days, has been convicted of some kind of crime. Anyway, that’s what happened to me. I got convicted and sentenced. And since there’s no appeals, I’m stuck serving my time.”

That certainly sounded familiar. Since it seemed like we were starting to bond a bit, I shared my story. “Yeah, I was convicted of suicide. Didn’t even know that was a crime. What’d they get you for?”

“Murder.”

Okay, that’s enough small talk, I thought. Deciding to get straight to the point, I asked, “The whole criminal justice system is corrupt. Right?”

“Yeah, I guess. There’s definitely no justice in the system. It’s not like I’ve been rehabilitated or anything. But, the system isn’t really designed to punish or rehabilitate anyone. It’s designed to generate combat troops for interstellar warfare.”

This wasn’t consistent with the faint recollection of justice I still had drifting around in my residual memory. “What about basic human rights? Don’t we have the right to appeal a court sentence?”

Lucy laughed at my ignorance. “You don’t get it man. You have no rights. You’re not human.”

I argued that I still felt human, but even as I pushed back against my unwelcome new reality, I knew that wasn’t entirely true. I didn’t have a corporeal presence, so logically I couldn’t be human. The only thing still human about me, was a vague recollection of my humanness. It wasn’t much to go on.

Thinking out loud, I grumbled, “This is totally fucking unfair.”

“Take it easy, you’ll get used to things. Besides, it’s not so bad. Understanding how the system works helps a little.”

I very much doubted that. Regardless, Lucy began educating me about the origins of the criminal/soldier military system. He explained how technology had begun to drive the politics of modern human civilization.

In a terrifying display of dystopian groupthink, humanity had started to confuse the political ends, with the technological means. No longer focused on achieving an enlightened human society, governments around the globe began chasing rapidly emerging technologies down a rabbit hole.

In many cases, new technologies began to outpace the problems they were originally intended to solve. Unexpectedly, this surplus of orphan technologies created new opportunities for unscrupulous political operatives. Here is where politics got flipped on its head.

The idea of left and right politics became meaningless. Suddenly, the successful politicians were the ones who could conjure up social problems, to justify the deployment of previously irrelevant technologies. Naturally, these politically driven “quality of life” initiatives, were funded by vast amounts of federal tax dollars. This in turn, created substantial new revenue streams for well-connected tech companies. Neo-politics and Big Tech fell in love. Ominously, the catchphrase, “Trust the science” became code for “don’t question authority”.

To a naïve public, it seemed like this new breed of political figure, was solving society’s problems at warp speed. These politicians thrived in a political landscape that resembled a permanent campaign cycle.

However, the reality was much darker. Political illusionists had mastered the art of creating a perception of fear in the mind of the public, even though the basis for that fear was only an elaborate fiction.

Sadly, the news media unwittingly became complicit in deceiving the masses. In an effort to attract as many eyeballs as possible, and by ignoring their journalistic obligation to vet the facts, the media began characterizing every social issue as a “crisis” worthy of headline status. The most insane pseudoscientific ideas were presented as legitimate “technological solutions”. It became impossible to differentiate reality from fantasy.

With so much of the public’s attention focused on this political kabuki theater, the business of politics spiraled out of control. Influence within the halls of government became a commodity, sold to the highest bidder no matter the consequences. It was in this fetid cesspool of self-interest that a seemingly innocuous medical technology, was marketed to the military as a solution to its chronic failures on the interstellar battlefield.

These days, it was considered unethical to send human soldiers to war. Interstellar combat had become far too lethal for human physiology. Even a heavily armored human body could be reduced to jelly by the concussion of a relatively small battlefield munition.

The military tried to develop autonomous robotic weapons for combat, but they failed. The artificial intelligence driving them was incapable of dealing with the variability inherent in combat.

They even tried using remote controlled weapons systems for combat, but the logistics were impractical. The enemy easily developed countermeasures to interrupt or coopt the communication links between the human operators and their weapons. Battlefield commanders soon found their weapons systems ineffective, or worse, turned against them. The results were catastrophic.

Consequently, an alternative was needed.

Under the mantle of scientific research into the root causes of suicide, it was discovered quite by accident that neurons within the human brain remained active for up to an hour after clinical death. By recording the residual patterns of electrical emissions within these arrays of neurons, scientists were able to decode the language of the human brain. This discovery proved to be a very effective analytical tool in researching a range of psychological disorders.

Decades later, an enterprising computer scientist discovered how to configure an AI, using a copied consciousness, to replicate human thought. By utilizing artificial intelligence to model patterns of neural signals, it was possible to extrapolate a digital facsimile of a unique human consciousness, memories and all.

The result was so similar to human sentience that once the research was made public, there were accusations of scientists playing God. The public outrage became so politically toxic that all of the funding was pulled, and the program terminated.

However, the implications of the technology had caught the attention of a shrewd Washington lobbyist. Subsequently, a global biomedical company quietly purchased the patents and rights to all of the research findings. The stage was set for this orphan technology to make a monumental contribution to humanity’s interstellar expansion.

The development of the universal combat consciousness began soon after.