"So, PEREGRINE. We reported to Sand Creek, a secret base in South Dakota. . . ."
"I've heard of that," Ramsey said slowly. "Sand Creek. . . ."
"No doubt you have. It's been talked about a lot over the years. But whatever you've heard is almost certainly not true." Sellars closed his eyes. "Where was I? Ah, yes. We began undergoing a very complicated process to make us capable of all kinds of rigors—and, most importantly, to hard-interface our brains with the ship's computer systems. You almost never hear that word 'computer' anymore, do you? They're part of everything now. They used to be boxes with keyboards, you know." He shook his head, so that it looked like a dry sunflower wobbling on its stalk. "Technology wasn't very sophisticated—this was half a century ago, after all. Much of what they did was surgical—actually opened me up and applied microcircuitry directly to my skeleton, implanted various devices, you name it. People take it for granted now that they can connect to the net with a neurocannula, but then the idea that a human being could channel computer information directly into the brain was mostly considered science fiction. Except at Sand Creek, where they were actually doing it.
"So they . . . built me, as it were. Rebuilt me, certainly, strengthened my bones and shielded my skin and various organs to better resist gravitational hardships and radiation, implanted tiny chemical pumps that would add synthesized calcium and other important supplements to my body if I had to go a long time in zero gravity . . . all kinds of things. But even more profound was the way they wired me—head to toe, like a Christmas tree! They used the latest alloys and polymers—although with all the changes in molecular engineering since then, the original stuff they put in me would seem positively antique now. But at the time, we PEREGRINE volunteers were works of art. That's when I first learned to love Yeats—the line about the emperor's mechanical birds in 'Sailing to Byzantium' caught at me:
". . . Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enameling. . . ."
He paused for a moment, lost in thought. "I cannot tell you what it was like the first time I simply closed my eyes and found myself online. The net was tiny and primitive then, the early days of virtual interfaces, but still. . . ! Still. . . ! Already, without leaving Earth, we were explorers, flying where others had only crawled. We PEREGRINE volunteers began to talk about the net among ourselves as though it were a place, a universe that others could only visit, like tourists staring through a fence, but which truly belonged to us. When you can swim through information as though it were a physical medium, when access is instantaneous, you begin to see things, learn things. . . ." His voice was getting dry and thin; he stopped and inhaled from the rag. "I promised myself I would not be diverted, didn't I? I apologize. In any case, our ships were built at the same time we ourselves were built—in parallel, as it were—custom-tailored to our particular physiological needs. They were small, sophisticated, using primarily antimatter drives for the long, black distances, but able to use other sources of power as well, including solar wind. There was to be one for each of us, each named for an explorer—the Francis Drake, the Matthew Peary, I cannot remember them all now and it's too sad to try. Mine was the Sally Ride. A lovely name for a ship, and a lovely ship she would have been—my bride, you might say, on a permanent honeymoon. But it did not happen that way.
We only had a few orbital nights, practice runs, before. . . . Oh, dear, am I boring you?"
Michael Sorensen had fallen asleep sitting up on the couch, his head lolling on his wife's shoulder. "He's just exhausted," she said apologetically, as though he had nodded off at some suburban card party. "He must know all this already, doesn't he?"
"All but the fine details," Sellars told her gently. "He's looked through my file a few times since I made contact, I'm sure."
"I think it's fascinating," she assured him, although she looked quite tired herself. "I . . . I had no idea."
"Please go on," Ramsey said.
"Well, you both must know something about what happens when you work for the government, and this was in the early days of the private/public partnership, so-called. The administration in Washington changed. The UN grew snippy about a major project with so little international participation. And the corporate angels began to grumble about how much money was being spent with no returns in the foreseeable future. PEREGRINE was nearly canceled several times.
"There were nights later on, years worth of nights, when I used to wish with all my heart it had been.
"The solution was not really surprising, especially with large defense corporations involved. It was decided to streamline the operation, to get 'more bang for the buck,' I think the phrase of the day was. It would have been very difficult to make the project smaller at that fairly advanced stage, so instead they folded it together with something called HR/CS—Human Robotic Combat Systems. I think that project also had a code name—'Bright Warrior' or 'Bright Spear' or something, but the engineers started calling it HARDCASE and the name stuck. This was straight military, what was probably one of the first attempts to create biomodified soldiers—basically humans who could be plugged into extremely sophisticated combat armor, who could use these systems as extensions of their own bodies, go places even an ordinary armored soldier couldn't go. You get the idea—it was like something out of an old comic book. The military was much more intent on their timeline, so the shared resources—mostly engineers, medical personnel, and supercomputer time—began to flow in their direction. The pace of PEREGRINE slowed dramatically.
"All of which wouldn't have meant all that much, except that HARDCASE had a much different approach, especially to recruiting. Their process was much closer to what I had imagined would be used on PEREGRINE, focusing on reflexes and even more esoteric things, synaptic variations, certain types of chemical and immune system receptivities, and so on. And even psychologically they were looking for a different kind of subject. We were pilots, had been chosen primarily as such—some of the PEREGRINE subjects had never flown a combat mission, but they were all fliers, much like the original astronaut corps. HARDCASE needed soldiers. You might even say that, ultimately, they needed killers. They tried to be more discriminating than that, but that infinitesimal slant shadowed it from the beginning, I think.
"Even so, if Barrett Keener's problems had been physical—a tumor, say, or a serotonin imbalance, it would have been caught immediately. Both PEREGRINE and HARDCASE subjects were routinely tested for such things, and we spent most of our time hooked up to analytical devices as a matter of course. But in those days pure schizophrenia was still largely a mystery, and Keener was the sort of paranoid who made hiding his growing illness part of the focus of his madness. Although very few people who worked with the man could honestly say they liked him, not a single one of the psychologists or doctors at Sand Creek or any of his HARDCASE co-subjects guessed that he was slowly going insane. Not until it was too late.
"I see the look on your face, Mr. Ramsey. No, you haven't ever heard of Keener. You'll find out why in a moment.
"I can be brief about this, and I would prefer to be. I lost many friends on the day of Keener's rampage. There were plenty of safeguards built into the system, but although the military and its contractors had considered the possibility of sabotage, and had even considered the frightening possibility that one of the HARDCASE subjects might have a breakdown, no one had considered that both might happen. Keener, caught in the grip of a strengthening psychotic delusion, had been preparing for weeks. The HARDCASE complex at Sand Creek was an arsenal—the cybernetic battle-suits themselves each carried the firepower of a Powell tank, and there was a stockpile of other ordnance for combat-testing purposes. But as deadly as the battle-suits were, for someone like Barrett Keener with a background in munitions there was even more damage that could be done. He spent weeks preparing in secret, determined to avenge some incomprehensible insult, or strike some unimaginable blow for delusional freedom, descending deeper and deeper into a black spiral of hatred.