performance of stabilizers prior to their failure, to see whether there was some invariable indicator that would warn commanders that it was time for a replacement or modification.
The unbreakable jack fail-safe supposedly was to keep people from harming themselves or others, though everybody knew it was just to maintain the government monopoly. Like a lot of things that everybody knows, it wasn't true. It wasn't quite true that you couldn't modify a jack in place, either, but the changes were limited to memory-usually when a soldier saw something the army wanted him or her to forget. Only two of the Saturday Night Special group knew about that.
Sometimes they erased a soldier's memory of an event for security reasons; less often, for humane ones.
Almost all of Marty's work now was with the military, which made him uncomfortable. When he had started in the field, thirty years before, jacks were crude, expensive, and rare, used for medical and scientific research.
Most people still worked for a living then. A decade later, at least in the 'first world,' most jobs having to do with production and distribution of goods were obsolete or quaint. Nanotechnology had given us the nano-forge: ask it for a house, and then put it near a supply of sand and water. Come back tomorrow with your moving van. Ask it for a car, a book, a nail file. Before long, of course, you didn't have to ask it; it knew what people wanted, and how many people there were.
Of course, it could also make other nanoforges. But not for just anybody. Only for the government. You couldn't just roll up your sleeves and build yourself one, either, since the government also owned the secret of warm fusion, and without the abundant free power that came from that process, the nanoforge couldn't exist.
Its development had cost thousands of lives and put a huge crater in North Dakota, but by the time Julian was in school, the government was in a position where it could give everybody any material thing. Of course, it wouldn't give you everything you wanted; alcohol and other drugs were strictly controlled, as were dangerous things like guns and cars. But if you were a good citizen, you could live a life of comfort and security without lifting a finger to work, unless you wanted to. Except for the three years you were drafted.
Most people spent those three years working in uniform a few hours a day in Resource Management, which was dedicated to making sure the nanoforges had access to all the elements they needed. About five percent of the draftees put on blue uniforms and became caregivers, people whose tests said they would be good working with the sick and elderly. Another five percent put on green uniforms and became soldiers. A small fraction of those tested out fast and smart, and became mechanics.
People in National Service were allowed to reenlist, and a large number did. Some of them didn't want to face a lifetime of total freedom, perhaps uselessness. Some liked the perquisites that went along with the uniform: money for hobbies or habits, a kind of prestige, the comfort of having other people tell you what to do, the ration card that gave you unlimited alcohol, off duty.
Some people even liked being allowed to carry a gun.
The soldiers who weren't involved in soldierboys, waterboys, or flyboys-the people mechanics called 'shoes' – got all of those perquisites, but always faced a certain probability of being ordered to go out and sit on a piece of disputed real estate. They usually didn't have to fight, since the soldierboys were better at it and couldn't be killed, but there was no doubt that the shoes fulfilled a valuable military function: they were hostages. Maybe even lures, staked goats for the Ngumi long-range weapons. It didn't make them love the mechanics, as often as they owed their lives to them. If a soldierboy got blown to bits, the mechanic just put on a fresh one. Or so they thought. They didn't know how it felt I LIKED SLEEPING IN the soldierboy. Some people thought it was creepy, so complete a knockout it was like death. Half the platoon stands guard while the other half is shut down for two hours. You fall asleep like a light being turned out and wake up just as suddenly, disoriented but as rested as you would have been after eight hours of normal sleep. If you get the full two hours, that is.
We had taken refuge in a burned-out schoolhouse in an abandoned village. I was on the second sleep shift, so I first spent two hours sitting at a broken window, smelling jungle and old ashes, patient in the unchanging darkness. From my point of view, of course, it was neither dark nor unchanging. Starlight flooded the scene like monochromatic daylight, and once each ten seconds I switched to infrared for a moment. The infrared helped me track a large black cat that stalked up on us, gliding through the twisted remains of the playground equipment. It was an ocelot or something, aware of motion in the schoolhouse and looking for a meal. When it got within ten meters it froze for a long period, scenting nothing, or maybe machine lubricant, and then was away in a sudden flash.
Nothing else happened. After two hours, the first shift woke up. We gave them a couple of minutes to get their bearings and then passed on the 'sit-rep,' situation report: negative.
I fell asleep and instantly awoke to a blaze of pain. My sensors brought in nothing but blinding light, a roar of white noise, searing heat-and complete isolation! All of my platoon was disconnected or destroyed.
I knew it wasn't real; knew I was safe in a cage in Portobello. But it still hurt like a third-degree burn over every square centimeter of naked flesh, eyeballs fried in their sockets, one dying inhalation of molten lead, enema of same: complete feedback overload.
It seemed to last for a long time-long enough for me to think this was actually it; the enemy had cracked Portobello or nuked it, and it was actually me dying, not my machine. Actually, we were switched off after 3.03 seconds. It would have been quicker, but the mechanic in Delta platoon who was our horizontal liaison-our link to the company commander if I died-was disoriented by the sudden intensity of it, even secondhand.
Later satellite analysis showed two aircraft catapulted from five kilometers away. They were stealthed and, with no propellant, left no heat signature. One pilot ejected just before the plane hit the schoolhouse. The other plane was either automatically guided or its pilot came in with it-kamikaze or ejection failure.
Both planes were full of incendiaries. About one hundredth of a second after Candi sensed something was wrong, all our soldierboys were trying to cope with a flood of molten metal.
They know we have to sleep, and know how we do it. So they contrive things like this setup: a camouflaged catapult, zeroed on a building we would sooner or later use, its two-pilot crew waiting for months or years.
They couldn't have just boobytrapped the building, because we would have sensed that amount of incendiary or other explosive.
In Portobello, three of us went into cardiac arrest; Ralph died. They used air-cushion stretchers to move us to the hospital wing, but it still hurt to move; just to breathe.
Physical treatment wouldn't touch where that pain was, the phantom pain that was the nervous system's memory of violent death. Imaginary pain had to be fought through the imagination.
They jacked me into a Caribbean island fantasy, swimming warm waters with lovely black women. Lots of virtual fruit-and-rum drinks, and then virtual sex, virtual sleep.
When I woke up still in pain, they tried the opposite scenario-a ski resort, thin dry cool air. Fast slopes, fast women, the same sequence of virtual voluptuousness. Then canoeing in a calm mountain lake. Then a hospital bed in Portobello.
The doctor was a short guy, darker than me. 'Are you awake, sergeant?'
I felt the back of my head. 'Evidently.' I sat up and clutched at the mattress until the dizziness subsided. 'How are Candi and Karen?'
'They'll be all right. Do you recall...'
'Ralph died. Yes.' I dimly remembered when they had stopped working on him, and brought the other two out of the cardiac unit. 'What day is it?'
'Wednesday.' The shift had started Monday. 'How do you feel? You're free to go as soon as you feel up to it.'
'Medical leave?' He nodded. 'The skin pain is gone. I still feel strange. But I've never spent two days jacked into fantasies before.' I put my feet on the cold tile floor and stood up. I walked shakily across the room to a closet and found a dress uniform there, and a bag with my civvies.
'Guess I'll hang around awhile, check on my platoon. Then go home or wherever.'
'All right. I'm Dr. Tull, in RICU Recovery, if you have any problems.' He shook hands and left. Do you salute doctors?
I decided to wear the uniform and dressed slowly and sat there for awhile, sipping ice water. I'd lost soldier- boys twice before, but both times it was just a twist of disorientation and then switch-off. I'd heard about these total feedback situations, and knew of one instance when a whole platoon had died before they could be turned off. Supposedly, that couldn't happen anymore.
How would it affect our performance? Scoville's platoon went through it last year. We all had to spend a cycle
