Cogs

2

Romero had just finished destroying his third artillery emplacement when a trio of light recon vehicles appeared on his sensors. The rapidly moving armored cars were spread out behind his position. He swung the Berserker around in place. Without hesitating, Romero triggered the tank's anti-personnel weapon. The flechette gun shredded the nearest armored car, reducing it to a smoking, jagged heap of perforated metal. He killed the next closest with a quick burst from the quench guns. But as he swung the guns to bear on the third and furthest vehicle he saw a soldier pop up in its open turret, hurriedly bringing a missile launcher up to his shoulder. Romero didn't aim; there wasn't time. Just before the recon car exploded, the gunner managed to launch the rocket.

Romero felt the Mafeng anti-tank missile lock on, the sensation not unlike that of a snakebite. The flechette gun was in its reloading cycle. Romero needed to buy time if only a second or two. Romero willed the nuclear-powered turbines to peak capacity. The giddy sensation of one hundred megajoules of harnessed energy surged through Romero's body, eliciting an involuntary reaper's grin. The tank surged forward, its speed cresting over 220kph. The flattened, angular shape of the huge tank slewed violently; the red-lined thrusters sent huge sprays of muck high in the air with every wild, careening turn. The minigun was taking its sweet time reloading–time Romero did not have.

The hungry missile closed rapidly; thick black smoke swirled behind it as it homed in on the swerving hovertank. Desperate, Romero tried ECM/ECCM jamming though he knew it would fail. The Chinese provided tank-killers were state of the art.

So am I, thought Romero. Not today, motherfuckers! The wired human grit his teeth as he forced the nose of the behemoth hovertank around sharply, the heavy G's punishing him as he accelerated through the 180-degree turn.

"Come on Katie, you can do it." He growled aloud as the tank protested with a metallic scream during the improbably tight maneuver. A statuette of a hula girl stuck incongruously upon the glowing console, rocked crazily as the craft tilted sharply.

Romero's head rang with the shrill warnings of the incoming missile alarms. He shut them down with a thought. "I know for fuck's sake!" he swore angrily. It was a long shot, but maybe he could pull off the impossible and shoot down the missile with his main guns. It was the only chance he had.

Through Kate's sensors, Romero perceived the thin, diminishing infrared trails of the quench guns' high-density slugs shimmering in the cool night air as he desperately sought to burn down the evading missile. For all the millions of dollars invested in both man and machine, a missile built for less than a thousandth of the cost was prevailing.

The Mafeng's AI confidently ignited its afterburners, closing in on its prey. The powerful missile was completely locked in on target; it was coming in for the kill. Romero winced in anticipation — this was going to hurt.

Suddenly, he felt the humming thrill of the flechette gun spinning up to speed. It had finally finished reloading! The elated young soldier thought 'Fire!' The missile disintegrated harmlessly as a hailstorm of titanium needles ripped it to pieces mid-air only twenty meters from its target. Romero heard and felt the remains of the Mafeng strike Kate's skin as if it was his own skin being pelted by windblown debris.

"Good girl!" Romero said aloud, "That was a close one." He subconsciously stroked the console with the same gentleness as if it were the breast of a lover. In a way, the hovertank was his lover. Linking his mind to the hovertank's artificial intelligence via cybernetic implants was in many ways a greater intimacy than any human lover might share.

Cybernetically enhanced soldiers were nothing new on the battlefields. For decades, the arms race of hardware and software ruled modern warfare. Non-enhanced soldiers still existed in abundance primarily because cybernetics were prohibitively expensive even for the US military. Only elite servicemen and women were 'gifted' with the boon of implanted electronics. Some of the most advanced systems were provided pilots because, in addition to the extreme cost of their wiring, they also commanded state of the art vehicles.

In the early twenty-first century, a top of the line Main Battle Tank required a crew of four highly trained non-enhanced humans to cooperate effectively as a team. Later, robotic, unmanned vehicles rose to prominence but proved unable to adapt to rapidly changing combat situations, and they were prone to being hacked. Now, a single wired pilot became the tank, merging his mind with the machine, assisted by a series of robotic systems and an integrated, yet limited vehicle AI. In essence, they became a lethal new life form that dominated the modern battlefields.

Since the earliest test phases, cybernetic pilots reported that their vehicles possessed their own 'personalities' or 'characters.' Scientists, engineers, and programmers repeatedly verified that every vehicle was virtually identical and that the programmed AI was exactly the same code. Yet every pilot, time after time, swore their vehicles were somehow alive. Failing to find any concrete explanation for the phenomena, the book was closed with a simple, final verdict—cybernetic pilots were an odd breed.

It was true that they were a quirky bunch indeed. Wr8th Romero for example, had a habit of bonding with his vehicles, claiming that if he listened carefully, on his initial linkup, it would tell him 'her name.' Other wired soldiers had rituals that made Romero's naming habit seem quaint by comparison.

Often teased, sometimes harassed, for their seemingly perverse machine love, it seemed as if the only people who really understood cybernetic pilots were other cybernetic pilots. Thus, they began to consort only with their own kind, forming a subculture isolated from the non-enhanced troopers. Despite their extraordinary combat performance, prejudice within the service remained high. The slander that wired pilots preferred linking with their machines more than intercourse with other humans became a widespread belief. The epithet 'Cogs,' arose, inspired by the phrase "Cogs in the Machine." The term was meant as an insult, but instead, the phrase was embraced by the strange community of cyborgs.