‘Jesus.” Dalton shook his head. Two seconds was forever in combat. “We’re back to the days of lever action rifles.”
“Is that the best weapon you have for us?” Anderson asked.
“We have some other options in terms of power and rate,” Hammond said defensively.
“What about if we have to take out armor?” Dalton asked.
“Then you materialize inside the tank,” Raisor said, “and you kill the crew.”
“Could I then use the tank?” Dalton asked.
“You can use anything you can retrieve,” Raisor said. “That’s one of the beauties of this type of operation. You will have the element of surprise and then of shock. You’ll materialize out of nowhere, in a form that can hardly be seen, and what they do see will scare the piss out of them. Your weapons will be something they’ve also never experienced before. You’ll have more than enough advantage.”
“Against a force that’s going to attack a company of infantry?” Dalton asked. “With only seven of us?”
“Eight. And all we have to do is stop them from taking the warheads,” Raisor said. “That means just disrupt the attack.”
“I think you are severely underestimating your advantages,” Dr. Hammond said. “You will be able to move anywhere you want in an instant. And your physical selves will be here, at Bright Gate, safe. That’s a tremendous advantage. You can’t get killed, like a kid playing a video game on ‘God’ mode.”
“What about the avatars?” Dalton asked, not thrilled with comparison to a video game. He’d been hearing about “push-button” warfare for over two decades now and he didn’t buy into it. Sooner or later it always came down to some guy with a gun in his hand standing on a piece of terrain over the body of another guy with a gun. “What if one of the avatars is shot? How does that affect our physical selves and the form?”
“Your physical self will be fine,” Hammond said. “The virtual form you project will be disrupted. What you are basically doing is transforming energy into matter. If the matter gets disrupted, it will backflow to the energy field. But you’ll be able to ‘dissolve’ your avatar and re-form it again, so in effect, you will be indestructible.”
“So why can’t we just go as those tubes and fire everyone up?” Captain Anderson wanted to know.
“Because it’s difficult to maneuver such a form,” Hammond said. “We much prefer to give you an avatar that can actually make contact with the ground and any other surface. That can move physically if you need to. To disappear and re-form takes time and practice, neither of which we have much of right now.
“Also, you are used to having two arms and two legs and having your head on top of your shoulders. That might sound funny to you, but we try to approximate the human form as much as possible because it is the way you are used to getting sensory input and also the way you are used to moving. We could give you four arms, but how would you use the extra two? Where in your mind would you direct the commands for those arms to function? Perhaps with a lot of practice you might, but for a long time any additions or differences would only be a distraction. Trust me on this. A human-type form is the best for you to have as your avatar.”
Raisor stood. “The best thing to do is for you to experience it firsthand. Perhaps that will answer many of the questions you might have. Let’s get going. The clock is ticking.”
Feteror remembered the plane ride out of Afghanistan. It was the last memory he had of the time before the long darkness. The last memory of being a man, even a wounded, dying shell of a man.
He had learned over the years to be able to put his memories into the mainframe computer he was hooked to. It was the only way he could “experience” a real life— replaying his memories, reliving them inside the computer. They were as “real” as the women the programmers sent to him for his “relief”
He often regretted that he didn’t know more about computers, but at the time he had been shipped to Afghanistan, computers had barely appeared in the Russian world, other than those the government used.
The scientists called the master computer at SD8-FFEU Zivon, which was a Russian name that meant alive.
The scientists had great respect for the computer that assisted Feteror in accomplishing his missions, but Feteror knew the computer to be stupid and unimaginative. He supposed that as machines went, it was quite an impressive piece of equipment, but it was poor companionship for all the years he had spent hooked to it.
Of course, Feteror knew, the scientists also had named Zivon thusly because they considered Feteror to be part of the computer. They saw no clear separation between the human brain and remaining body floating in a solution inside the metal cylinder and the circuitry and memory boards that surrounded it. Feteror himself often wondered where the line was as he wandered the electronic corridors of Zivon.
The Russians had long worked at direct interfaces between the human mind and the machine mind. Ethical considerations had limited what could be done in the West, even though their machines were so much superior. SD8 had no such considerations to worry about and they had had access to all the other work being done in secret Soviet labs on cyborgs.
Feteror had looked up the word cyborg early in his new life after overhearing the technicians using it. The most interesting thing he had discovered about the definition was the part where it said that the human, once it became a cyborg, was then reliant on the machinery that was part of it for its survival.
During one of his maintenance periods, the technicians had turned his video eye— since his virtual demon’s eye could never enter SD8-FFEU— on the metal cylinder that held him and the surrounding machinery. It had been hard for Feteror to accept that what he saw was his “self.”
He remembered seeing himself in a training film when he had still been fully human and being surprised at what he saw, as many people were, not used to seeing themselves and having developed an unconscious representation in their own mind of what they looked like, sometimes at odds with the reality. Much as people were always surprised to hear their voice on tape, as it sounded different somehow. But seeing the machines that made him up had been far beyond anything any human had ever experienced.
Feteror had long ago ceased thinking of himself as he had been in human form, but he had not been willing or able to translate that concept to the machines that surrounded the husk of his body. He preferred instead to view himself as Chyort, the demon avatar he went on missions as. But that didn’t mean he had been able to completely close the door on his past.
Feteror was very careful with his memories. They were all he had and he had made sure to encode them and hide them deep inside Zivon. Everyone he had known, and how he had known them, was in there. Everything he had ever done. Everywhere he had ever been. Even when Rurik cut his power down to minimum, Feteror was free to roam those parts of Zivon that were accessible to him, the space he was allowed for his own use.
And those parts of Zivon that the scientists had blocked off from him— Rurik was no fool— Feteror was still trying to get to. Like a prisoner slowly chipping away at a prison wall with a spoon, Feteror had been working on breaking through the circuit walls that surrounded him, trying to get to the outer world of Zivon, which he knew would give him access to the entire world of the Internet and beyond. His goal was simply to be able to shut Zivon down, and in the process kill himself, but he had become aware of the incredible electronic virtual world that had sprung up in the past decade and it had piqued his interest.
Rurik never gave Feteror access to any information other than what was needed to accomplish his missions, but each time he was out on one of those missions, Feteror always made sure to try to gain more data. Several times he had materialized and accessed into computers, “surfing” the Internet, a phrase he found most amusing, and an experience he had found quite stimulating. He had learned much, more than General Rurik could even begin to suspect. He had learned much about Rurik also, because he believed one of the keys to his plan was to understand his captor completely in order to be able to manipulate him.