“It doesn’t correlate much with politics,” Marty said. “And it’s usually people in their first year or two. More often female than male. He’s not a good candidate.” The coffee came and he picked up the cup and blew on it. “So how about this weather? Clear and cool, they said.”
“Love them Knicks,” I said.
Reza nodded. “The square root of minus one.” There was going to be no more talk of empathy failures that night.
* * *
julian didn’t know how selective the draft really was, finding people for specific mechanics’ slots. There were a few hunter/killer platoons, but they tended to be hard to control, on a couple of levels. As platoons, they followed orders poorly, and they didn’t integrate well “horizontally,” with other platoons in the company. The individual mechanics in a hunter/killer platoon tended not to link strongly with one another.
None of this was surprising. They were made up of the same kind of people earlier armies chose for “wet work.” You expected them to be independent and somewhat wild.
As Julian had observed, most platoons had at least one person who seemed like a really unlikely choice. In his outfit it was Candi, horrified by the war and unwilling to harm the enemy. They were called stabilizers.
Julian suspected she acted as a kind of conscience for the platoon, but it would be more accurate to call her a governor, like the governor on an engine. Platoons that didn’t have one member like Candi had a tendency to run out of control, go “berserker.” It happened sometimes with the hunter/killer ones, whose stabilizers couldn’t be too pacifistic, and it was tactically a disaster. War is, according to von Clausewitz, the controlled use of force to bring about political ends. Uncontrolled force is as likely to harm as to help.
(There was a mythos, a commonsense observation, that the berserker episodes had a good effect in the long run, because they made the Ngumi more afraid of the soldierboys. Actually, the opposite was true, according to the people who studied the enemy’s psychology. The soldierboys were most fearsome when they acted like actual machines, controlled from a distance. When they got angry or went crazy—acting like men in robot suits—they seemed beatable.)
More than half of the stablilizers did crack before their term was up. In most cases it was not a sudden process, but was preceded by a period of inattention and indecision. Marty and Ray would be reviewing the performance of stabilizers prior to their failure, to see whether there was some invariable indicator that would warn commanders that it was time for a replacement or modification.
The unbreakable jack fail-safe supposedly was to keep people from harming themselves or others, though everybody knew it was just to maintain the government monopoly. Like a lot of things that everybody knows, it wasn’t true. It wasn’t quite true that you couldn’t modify a jack in place, either, but the changes were limited to memory—usually when a soldier saw something the army wanted him or her to forget. Only two of the Saturday Night Special group knew about that.
Sometimes they erased a soldier’s memory of an event for security reasons; less often, for humane ones.
Almost all of Marty’s work now was with the military, which made him uncomfortable. When he had started in the field, thirty years before, jacks were crude, expensive, and rare, used for medical and scientific research.
Most people still worked for a living then. A decade later, at least in the “first world,” most jobs having to do with production and distribution of goods were obsolete or quaint. Nanotechnology had given us the nanoforge: ask it for a house, and then put it near a supply of sand and water. Come back tomorrow with your moving van. Ask it for a car, a book, a nail file. Before long, of course, you didn’t have to ask it; it knew what people wanted, and how many people there were.
Of course, it could also make other nanoforges. But not for just anybody. Only for the government. You couldn’t just roll up your sleeves and build yourself one, either, since the government also owned the secret of warm fusion, and without the abundant free power that came from that process, the nanoforge couldn’t exist.
Its development had cost thousands of lives and put a huge crater in North Dakota, but by the time Julian was in school, the government was in a position where it could give everybody any material thing. Of course, it