I kept the silence after I finished for a moment so they would feel a bit more uncomfortable. This is the first time they’ve dealt directly with a soldier, and I didn't make it easy for them. After a moment, Erwa spoke, or at least tried to...
“Thank you, General, as I understood from the mission briefing, discipline and secrecy is needed much more on this project more than anything we’ve worked on before, and I hope we will maintain it...”
Erwa had hardly finished the sentence before I played like he was annoying me with his high-pitched voice. The two others, after watching the “prodigy” being mistreated, preferred to skip their speeches. I didn’t want them to think that we are here to chat. A soldier would understand that instinctively, a civilian needs to be taught and reminded. Although I felt sorry for them, they thought they would meet the same mentality as they were used to in their entourage, a god worshiping herds of fans running to them, pleasing their egos. They found something completely different.
They were in the army now.
Chapter 5
The Boring Look Is the Safest
“The chameleon’s skin is not the chameleon.”
~ Konu
I n the morning, I was parking the limousine in front of his house. I could see him between the trees. He was on the porch staring at his shoes, probably wondering if they needed extra polishing. The youngest Chief of the Armies of the Empire managed to look sharp even if he was living alone. There were no humbots at his home or in his entourage, no electronic devices, even the TV was analog. He had never been married; there were no mistresses either if we don’t count Oina. I have too much respect for her to categorize her as a mistress.
He was not one of the ugly types, but let's say the square ones, the army ones. It’s like when you bake a cake with high expectations, and then it comes out normal or less than that. You don’t complain; you eat it with a good coffee, but deep inside, you know it was a failure. The cake doesn’t have a personality. Konu has, and he managed to be charming by being extremely balanced and self-confident. He is not repulsive by any means, but he is like the stone’s statue made by a beginner sculpture. All the right elements are there but slightly in the wrong disposition.
Once he was seated inside the limousine, I gave him his carrot juice and service’s complementary report of the psychological behavior of the engineers. They had spent all night working on it as Konu asked for that straight after the meeting. He was sipping the juice and just staring at the cover.
He hadn't opened it yet when he asked me, “Dismar, if one of your soldiers started to behave weirdly, like adding bizarre accessories to his clothing, what would you think about him?”
I said, “Sir, what kind of accessories?”
“For example, something unique to the person. Not religious or lucky charms, the unusual ones. Something that maybe he made himself.”
“I’d think probably the soldier is starting to be very self-focused, losing it to his inner thoughts, converging slowly from reality. I would send him straight away to do a battery of psychological tests, and he better come up with good results. Otherwise, I couldn't keep him. I prefer that he would be somebody else’s problem, not mine,” I said.
Konu smiled at me. He opened the report after finishing his carrot juice and started reading it out loud. In a way, he always wanted to include me. Maybe it's his way to tell me that he trusted me, or is he really that naïve? I really don’t know, but to be honest, I already read the report when the Secret Services gave it to me this morning.
The army teaches you conformity. Anything a little bit extravagant, like not matching exactly the next soldier’s haircut, clothing, shoes, weapon disposition, speech, walk, and gestures, means you have a problem. As weird as it sounds, it works perfectly in the army because you are a disposal commodity catalogued by ranks. By treating everyone this way, millions of soldiers can be managed efficiently. A million men lost in a battle are easily replaceable from the inventory. Just check the ranks and refill. On the other hand, the three AI conglomerates, even if they are the size of an army, do not have the army’s management efficiency. They lack discipline and control. Even if they have a dedicated department for that, they call it “human resources” or “HR.” The HR department, unfortunately, has a complete misunderstanding of the individuals, ranks, and hierarchy. To them, these are just as a job title. In the army, rank is the person. The soldier’s rank is the soldier. And in my experience, no civilian can understand the raking logic. The civilians that manage the HR departments need themselves to be managed. Unfortunately, the brightest ones do not go to HR. To be more specific, only the unskilled employees are chosen to manage human resources. And even if a specialist in some very rare case ends up managing that department, he or she is already molded to be unsuccessful through years of experience of doing the job wrongly.
What Konu noticed at that meeting was the same as the Secret Services wrote. The three top engineers were starting to show signs of grandiose delusions, and no one cared at their companies. As long as they come up with good ideas, they were treated like gods. Something like that would never
