*
it wasn’t raining when I left Marty’s lab, but that turned out to be temporary. I saw a squall line coming at me down the street, but was providentially right by the Student Center. I locked up the bike and got through the doors just as the storm hit.
There’s a bright and noisy coffee place under the dome on the top of the building. That felt right. I’d spent too long cooped up in two skulls, contemplating skullduggery.
It was crowded for a Saturday, I guess because of the weather. It took me ten minutes to get through the line and negotiate a cup of coffee and a roll, and then there was no place to sit. But the inside of the dome had a ledge at the proper height for parking against.
I reviewed what I’d taken from Marty’s brain:
The 10 percent casualty figure for jacking didn’t tell the whole story. The raw figures were that 7.5 percent die, 2.3 percent are mentally disabled, 2.5 percent are slightly impaired, and 2 percent wind up like Amelia, unharmed but not jacked.
But the classified part is that more than half of the deaths are draftees who were slated to be mechanics, killed by the complexity of the soldierboy interface. Many of the others are due to undertrained surgeons and bad operating conditions in Mexico and Central America. On the large scale Marty was talking about, you wouldn’t use human surgeons at all, except for oversight. Automated brain surgery, Jesus. But Marty claimed it was a couple of orders of magnitude simpler when you didn’t have to wire into a soldierboy.
And even if it were ten percent death, the alternative is one hundred percent, chasing life all the way out to Hubble’s Wall.
Still, how do you get normal people to do it? Civilians who do it fit pretty narrow profiles: empaths, thrill-seekers; the chronically lonely and the sexually ambiguous. A lot of people who are in Amelia’s position: someone they love is jacked, and they want to be there.
The basic strategy is, first, you don’t give it away. One thing we’ve learned from the Universal Welfare State is that people devalue things they don’t pay for. It would cost a month of entertainment credits—but as a matter of fact, you’d be spending most of that month unconscious, anyhow.
And the empowerment factor will become compelling after a very few years: people who aren’t humanized will be less successful in the world. Maybe less happy, too, though that’s harder to demonstrate.
Another little problem was what to do with people like Amelia? They couldn’t be jacked, and so they couldn’t be humanized. They would be handicapped and angry—and able to do violence. Two percent of six billion is 120 million people. One wolf for every forty-nine sheep is another way of looking at it. Marty suggested that initially we relocate all of them onto islands, asking all the humanized islanders to emigrate.
Anybody could live comfortably anywhere, once we use the nanoforges to make other nanoforges and give them out freely to everyone, Ngumi or Alliance.
But the first order of business was to humanize the soldierboys and their leaders. That meant infiltrating Building 31 and isolating the high command for a couple of weeks. Marty had a plan for that, the War College in Washington ordering a simulation exercise that required isolation.
I was to be a “mole.” Marty had had my records modified, so that I’d just had an understandable episode of nervous exhaustion. “Sergeant Class is fit for duty, but it is recommended that Portobello take advantage of his education and experience, and transfer him to the command cadre.” Prior to that, he would do some selective memory transfer and storage: I would temporarily forget the suicide attempt, the takeover plot, and the apocalyptic results of the Jupiter Project. I would just go in and be myself.
My old platoon, as part of another “experiment,” would stay jacked long enough to become humanized, and I could be inside Building 31 to open the door for them when they came in to replace the security platoon.
The generals would be treated well. Marty would have temporary attachment orders cut for a neurosurgeon and her anesthesiologist from a base in Panama; together they have a phenomenal success rate of ninety-eight percent in jack installation.
Today, Building 31; tomorrow, the world. We could work outward from Portobello, and downward from Marty’s Pentagon contact, and quickly have all of the armed forces humanized. The war would end, incidentally. But the larger battle would just