Private Mark Wabash leaned forward
along the sun-baked crumbling ruins of a wall that used to be the side of an
upper-middle class townhouse. It seemed
odd to him to see the remains of people’s lives scattered about the
streets. It must have been a rather nice
little town, just a few short minutes outside a major commercial hub, central Europe’s
answer to the suburbs. He found it hard
to not imagine his own hometown torn into large swaths of pre-defined battle
zones, the broken backs of buildings roasting, collapsed in heaps, in the summer
sun, carefully calculated to block the greatest numbers of unauthorized routes.
It wasn’t like what he had seen in
his school’s historical databases of the mass destruction from the Second World War, the first pinpoint strikes in the Greater Middle Eastern conflicts or even
the tactical policing actions in major US cities during the Occupy War. The damage to those structures was clearly
collateral, unplanned, and maybe even accidental. The scene around him was a nearly perfect
execution of battle-space sculpting; each desiccated wall served a purpose.
Not one drone-placed charge,
variable-warhead inteli-bomb, or satellite-guided bullet was even a millimeter
off their intended targets, and each did exactly the right amount of damage to
take down specific support beams and structural pillars. Wabash even heard rumors that some of the
artillery strikes were fired as much as a minute before CENTCOM’s computers detected
and validated the hostile intentions of the insurgents here. That was hours before the official
announcement of intent to use force.
He wasn’t really sure how much to
trust those rumors, except that they made sense. After all, the seventh Geneva Convention had
banned pre-conflict battle-space sculpting ten years ago. They passed that resolution just after
targeting computers were upgraded to the point they could identify how to bring
down any building exactly as desired by taking out specific load bearing beams,
like controlled demolitions with a howitzer a hundred miles away. So, it made sense that the computers would be
given the launch authority as soon as the automated police action powers
subroutine began to validate the incoming intelligence reports. How else were they going to be able to
legally send the rounds down range?
Of course, several governments sued
in protest, but it wasn’t possible to prove any wrong doing, if there had been
any, since the first volley was actually fired from the Czechs’ own guns. That was the price of not upgrading their
weapons with better net-security software.
Wabash watched all the same old debates unfold on the unified news feed,
in between updating all of his buddies on what virtual reality-TV show he was
going to log into, and which censor he was going to troll with his
nearly-illegal commentaries and homespun sys-hacks.
That world was a long ways away now
that he was standing amid the results of a few millisecond loophole in
international law. The former residents
of the remains of a house he knelt by didn’t even have time to realize their
entire town was the epicenter of the latest war. Everything they had was “acquired” by the US
military as a strategic roadblock in the ongoing war on digital terror.
“Sarge, this is bullshit,” Wabash
whispered while keeping a watchful eye on the wrecked buildings. “What the hell are we doing out here. You know we’re chasing ghosts, right?”
“Shut the fuck up private,”
Sergeant Thomas Barker responded without lowering the binoculars. “LT wants us out here, so we’re here. Keep your eyes open and your mouth shut. Ghosts or not, we’re putting eyes on every
square inch of this town if that’s what it takes.”
“Well, fuck sarge, I thought we
signed up to fight some goddamn dirty black-hats, not pick through some poor
fucks shit,” Wabash quipped while tapping his rifle butt against a broken chuck
of a dresser dumped street-side from the house they paused near. “If I had known this was…”
Wabash was cut off by a quick silent
signal from Sgt Barker, his raised fist was followed by orders to look
forward. Training and field experience kicking
in, Wabash scrambled up a bit to get a better view, and engaged his tactical hud’s
zoom. In seconds, the urban-ruin
landscape in front of the squad came rushing closer to his eyes, and blurry
phantom images generated by his heartbeat and naturally unsteadiness of his
head started to be scrubbed out by the built in steady-cam software. A moment later, a stable and clear, if not slightly
pixilated image formed in his headset.
As soon as the image had mostly stabilized,
data-tags began popping up all across the image. The live real-world search engine picked
through and identified each item that it could, making reconstructions of partially
visible items with a 95% accuracy rating.
In less than twenty milliseconds per article, everything Wabash was viewing
was analyzed, categorized, cataloged, uploaded to the server, and placed in the
world search-map. Nothing immediately
grabbed either Wabash’s attention or tripped any filters in the headset.
“Where?” he grunted to the sergeant,
still intently scanning up ahead.
“Two blocks up,” Barker made a
sweeping motion forward with two fingers followed by a leftward flick of his
wrist, three fingers extended. “Third
building from the right.”
Quickly shifting his focus as
directed, Wabash began the automated process of tagging everything visible
through the gaping holes in the exterior walls.
An internationally available readymade loveseat found throughout the
free world, a coffee table from the same brand, a framed lithograph of a 1930’s
Parisian film poster – definitely a middle class home, nice but only on the
surface. After several passes over the
entire three-story structure and nothing catching his attention, Wabash glanced
over to the sergeant.
Barker’s
eyes were still intently buried in his binoculars, his body perfectly still,
but tensioned like a spring waiting to release.
Years of his life had been spent in situations exactly like this one,
some far away foreign town over run by junk mechs hacked together from spare
parts. It really didn’t matter how many
of these things he put down, the easy-to-come-by digital plans for them were
everywhere online, and the integrated real-world search features built into each
handheld computer meant that replacement and substitute parts could be found in
a matter of seconds. That is, if you
didn’t have your own multi-medium 3D printer.
With
one of those and the right raw materials, you could knock out a hundred combat
drones a day, complete with a weapons package that was on par with the latest
RDECOM tech. Hell, sometimes it seemed
like before the Army could field its newest top-secret toy, the black-hats
would already have completed the next generation. The boots on the ground might have given the “junk
mech” nickname to these Frankenstein machines, but the truth was, they were
often more advanced then the next generation war-fighters the Pentagon was just
starting to dream up.
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