grouchy because nothing had happened. They’d gone to three different ambush sites in nine days with nothing but bugs and birds showing up. It was obviously a make-work assignment, marking time.
He crawled out of the cage and it sealed shut for its ninety-second cleaning cycle. “Have fun,” Scoville said. “Bring something to read.”
“Oh, I think they’ll come up with some little chore for us to do.” He nodded morosely and hobbled away. They wouldn’t do a hot transfer if there was a choice. So it was something important that the hunter/killers weren’t supposed to know about.
The cage popped and I wiggled into it, quickly setting the muscle sensors and plugging in the orthotics and blood shunt. Then I closed the shell and jacked.
It was always disorienting for a moment, but a lot more so with a hot transfer, since being platoon leader, I went first, and was suddenly jacked with a bunch of relative strangers. I did know Scoville’s platoon vaguely, since I spent one day a month lightly jacked with him. But I didn’t know all the intimate details of their lives, and really didn’t care to know. I was plopped in the middle of this convoluted soap opera, an interloper who suddenly knew all the family secrets.
Two by two, they were replaced by my own men and women. I tried to concentrate on the problem at hand, which was to keep guard on the pairs of soldierboys as they spent their couple of minutes of immobile vulnerability, which was easy. I also tried to open a vertical link to the company commander and find out what was really going on. What were we going to do that was so secret Scoville was kept in the dark?
There was no answer until all of my people were in place. Then it came in a gestalt trickle while I automatically scanned the morning jungle for signs of trouble: there was a spy in Scoville’s platoon. Not a willing spy, but somebody whose jack was tapped, real time.
It might even have been Scoville himself, so he couldn’t be told. Brigade had set up an elaborate manipulation, where each member of the platoon was misinformed as to the location of their ambush. When an enemy force showed up in the middle of nowhere, they’d know which one was the leak.
I had a lot more questions than the company commander had answers. How could they control all the feedback states? If nine of the people thought they were at point A and one thought they were at point B, wouldn’t there be conspicuous confusion? How could the enemy tap a jack in the first place? What was going to happen to the mechanic who was affected?
That last one, she could answer. They would examine him and take out his jack, and he would serve out the rest of his term as a tech or a shoe, depending. Depending on whether he could count to twenty without taking off his shoes and socks, I supposed. Army neurosurgeons made a lot less than Dr. Spencer.
I cut off the thread to the commander, which didn’t mean she couldn’t eavesdrop on me if she wanted to. There were some large implications here, and you didn’t need a degree in cybercomm to see them. All of Scoville’s platoon had spent the last nine days in an elaborate and tightly maintained virtual-reality fiction. Everything each one saw and felt was monitored by Command, and fed back instantly in an altered state. That state included nine other tailor-made fictions for the rest of the platoon. A total of a hundred discrete fictions, constantly created and maintained nonstop.
The jungle around me was no more or less real than the coral reef I’d visited with Amelia. What if it bore no relation to where my soldierboy actually was?
Every mechanic has entertained the fantasy that there is no war at all; that the whole thing is a cybernetic construction that the governments maintain for reasons of their own. You can turn on the cube when you get home, and watch yourself in action, replaying the news—but that could be faked even more easily than the input/feedback state that connects soldierboy to mechanic. Had anybody actually been to Costa Rica, any mechanic? No one in the military could legally visit Ngumi territory.
Of course, that was nothing but a fantasy. The piles of shattered bodies in the control room had been real. They couldn’t have faked the nuclear flattening of three cities.