Szilard looked up sharply at Robbins. “I don’t much like that name,” Szilard said. “The genes of dead CDF volunteers are one component. And typically we use the volunteer genes as the template. But Special Forces has a wider latitude in the genetic material we’re able to use to build our soldiers. Given our mission for the CDF, it’s almost a requirement. Anyway, Boutin is legally dead—we’ve got a dead body with his genes in them. And we don’t know that he is alive. Does he have any survivors?”
“No,” Mattson said. “He had a wife and kid, but they died before he did. No other family.”
“Then there’s no problem,” Szilard said. “After you’re dead, your genes aren’t yours anymore. We’ve used expired colonist genes before. I don’t see why we can’t do it again.”
“I don’t remember hearing this about how you build your people, Szi,” Mattson said.
“We’re quiet about what we do, General,” Szilard said. “You know that.” He cut a piece of steak and speared it into his mouth. Robbins’s stomach grumbled. Mattson grunted, leaned back in his chair, and looked up at Phoenix, imperceptibly turning in the sky. Robbins followed his gaze and felt another pang of homesickness.
Presently Mattson turned his attention back to Szilard. “Boutin is one of my people,” he said. “For better or worse. I can’t pass the responsibility for this to you, Szi.”
“Fine,” Szilard said, and nodded to Robbins. “Then let me borrow Robbins. He can act as your liaison, so Military Research will still have a hand in. We’ll share information. We’ll borrow the technician too. Wilson. He can work with our technicians to integrate the Consu technology. If it works, we have Charles Boutin’s memories and motivations and a way to prepare for this war. If it doesn’t work, I have another Special Forces solider. Waste not. Want not.”
Mattson looked over to Szilard, considering. “You seem eager to do this, Szi,” Mattson said.
“Humans are moving toward war with three species who have allied together,” Szilard said. “That’s never happened before. We could take on any one of them, but not all three at once. Special Forces have been told to stop this war before it starts. If this helps us to do that, we should do it. Try it, at the very least.”
“Robbins,” Mattson said. “Your thoughts.”
“If General Szilard is correct, then doing this would get around the legal and ethical issues,” Robbins said. “That makes it worth a shot. And we’ll still be in the loop.” Robbins had his own personal set of worries about working with Special Forces technicians and soldiers, but it didn’t seem the right time to air them.
Mattson, however, did not need to be so circumspect. “Your boys and girls don’t play well with normal types, General,” Mattson said. “That’s one reason why Military Research and Special Forces research don’t work together much.”
“Special Forces are soldiers, first and last,” Szilard said. “They’ll follow orders. We’ll make it work. We’ve done it before. We had a regular CDF solider take part in Special Forces missions at the Battle of Coral. If we can make that work, we can get technicians to work together without undue bloodshed.”
Mattson tapped the table in front of him, pensively. “How long will this take?” he asked.
“We’ll have to build a new template for this body, not just adapt previous genetics,” Szilard said. “I’d need to double-check with my techs, but they usually take a month to build from scratch. After that it takes sixteen weeks minimum to grow a body. And then whatever time we need to develop the process to transfer the consciousness. We can do that and grow the body at the same time.”
“You can’t make that go any faster?” Mattson said.
“We could make it go faster,” Szilard said. “But then you’d have a dead body. Or worse. You know you can’t rush body manufacture. Your own soldiers’ bodies are grown on the same schedule, and I think you remember what happens when you rush that.”
Mattson grimaced; Robbins, who had been Mattson’s liaison for only eighteen months, was reminded that Mattson had been at this job for a very long time. No matter their working relationship, there were still gaps in Robbins’s knowledge of his boss.
“Fine,” Mattson said. “Take it. See if you can get anything out of it. But you watch him. I had my problems with Boutin, but I never saw him as a traitor. He fooled me. He fooled everyone. You’ll have Charles Boutin’s mind in one of your Special Forces bodies. God only knows what he could do with one of those.”
“Agreed,” Szilard said. “If the transfer is a success, we’ll know it sooner than later. If it’s not, I know where I can put him. Just to be sure.”
“Good,” Mattson said, and looked up again at Phoenix, circling in sky. “Phoenix,” he said, watching the world twirl above him. “A reborn creature. Well, that’s appropriate. A phoenix is supposed to rise up from the flames, you know. Let’s just hope this reborn creature doesn’t bring everything down in them.”
They all stared at the planet above them.
THREE
“This is it,” Colonel Robbins said to Lieutenant Wilson, as the body, encased in its crèche, was wheeled into the decanting lab.
“This is it,” agreed Wilson, who moved over to a monitor that would momentarily display the body’s vital signs. “Were you ever a father, Colonel?”
“No,” Robbins said. “My personal inclinations didn’t run that way.”
“Well, then,” Wilson said. “This is as close as you’ll probably get.”
Normally the birthing lab would be filled with up to sixteen Special Forces soldiers being decanted at once—soldiers who would be activated and trained together to build unit cohesion during training, and to ease the soldiers’ disorientation at being activated fully conscious but without any memory to speak of. This time, there was just one soldier: The one who would house Charles Boutin’s consciousness.
It had been more than two centuries since the nascent Colonial Union, faced with its spectacular failure to defend the earliest of its colonies (the planet Phoenix was called so for a reason), realized that unmodified human soldiers were unable to get the job done. The spirit was willing—human history recorded some of its greatest doomed battles in those years, with the Battle for Armstrong in particular studied as a masterful example of how to turn an imminent rout by alien forces into a shocking and painful Pyrrhic victory for one’s enemy—but the flesh was all too weak. The enemy, all of the enemies, were too fast, too vicious, too pitiless and too many. Human technology was good, and weapon to weapon humans were as well-equipped as the vast majority of their adversaries. But the weapon that ultimately matters is the one behind the trigger.
The earliest modifications were relatively simple: increased speed, muscle mass and strength, endurance. Early genetic engineers, however, were hampered by the practical and ethical problems of engineering humans in vitro, and then waiting for them to grow sufficiently large and smart enough to fight, a process that took roughly eighteen years. The Colonial Defense Forces discovered to its intense chagrin that many of its (relatively) lightly genetically-modified humans were not particularly pleased to discover they were raised as a crop of cannon fodder and refused to fight, despite the best indoctrination and propaganda efforts to persuade them otherwise. Unmodified humans were equally scandalized, as the effort smacked of yet another eugenics effort on the part of a human government, and the track record of eugenics-loving governments in the human experience was not exactly stellar.
The Colonial Union survived the wracking waves of political crises that followed in the wake of its earliest attempts to genetically engineer its soldiers, but just barely. Had the Battle for Armstrong not emphatically shown the colonies what sort of universe they were up against, the Union would likely have collapsed and the human colonies would have been left in the position of competing against each other as well as against every other intelligent species they had encountered to date.
The Union was also saved by the near-simultaneous arrival of dual, crit
ical technological discoveries: the ability to force-grow a human body to adult size in months, and the emergence of the consciousness transfer protocol that allowed the personality and memories of one individual to be transported into another brain, provided that brain had the same genetics, and had been adequately prepared with a series of pre-transfer procedures that developed some of the necessary bioelectrical pathways in the brain. These new technologies allowed the Colonial Union to develop a large, alternate pool of potential recruits: The elderly, many of whom would readily accept a life in the military rather than die of old age, and whose deaths, in any event, would not create the multi-generational demographic damage that ensued when large numbers of healthy young adults were blown out of the gene pool at the end of an alien’s weapon.
Presented with this bountiful new pool of potential recruits, the Colonial Defense Forces found it had the luxury of making certain staffing choices. The CDF would no longer ask colonists to serve in the CDF; this had the salutary effect of allowing colonists to focus on developing their new worlds and making as many second-generation colonists as their planets could handle. It also eliminated a key source of political tension between the colonists and their government. Now that the young adults of the colonies were no longer extracted from their homes and families to die on battlefields trillions of miles away, the colonists were largely unconcerned with the ethical issues surrounding genetically modified soldiers, particularly ones who had, after all, volunteered to fight.
In the stead of colonists, the CDF chose to select its recruits from the inhabitants of humanity’s ancestral home, Earth. The Earth held billions of people: More people on that single globe, in fact, than existed on all the human colonies combined. The pool of potential recruits was enormous—so large that the CDF further limited its pool, choosing to take its recruits from comfortable and industrialized nations whose economic circumstances allowed their citizens to survive well into their later years, and whose social blueprints created both an overemphasis on the desirability of youth and a parallel and profound national psychic discomfort with aging and death. These senior citizens were patterned by their societies to be excellent and eager recruits for the CDF; the CDF quickly discovered that these senior citizens would join up for a military tour even in the absence of detailed information about what such a tour entailed—and indeed, recruitment yields were higher the less the recruits knew. Recruits assumed military service in the CDF was like military service on Earth. The CDF was content to let the assumption stand.
Recruiting seniors from industrialized nations proved so successful that the Colonial Union protected its recruiting pool by banning colonists from those nations, selecting its colonist pool from nations whose economic and social problems encouraged the more ambitious of its young people to get the hell out as soon as humanly possible. This division of military and colonist recruitment paid rich dividends for the Colonial Union in both areas.
The military recruitment of senior citizens presented the CDF with one unexpected problem: A fair number of recruits died before they could join the service, victims of heart attacks, strokes, and too many cheeseburgers, cheesecakes and cheese curds. The CDF, who took genetic samples from its recruits, eventually found itself stocked with a library of human genomes it wasn’t doing anything with. The CDF also found itself with a desire and also a need to continue experimenting with the body models of the Colonial Defense Forces to improve their design, without cutting into the effectiveness of the fighting force it already had.
Then came a breakthrough: an immensely powerful, compact, semi-organic computer, thoroughly integrated with the human brain, which in a moment of profoundly inappropriate branding was lightly dubbed the BrainPal. For a brain already filled with a life’s worth of knowledge and experience, the BrainPal offered a critical assist in mental ability, memory storage and communication.
But for a brain that was literally tabula rasa, the BrainPal offered even more.
Robbins peered into the crèche, where the body lay, held into place by a suspension field. “He doesn’t look much like Charles Boutin,” he said to Wilson.
Wilson, who was now making last-minute adjustments on the hardware that contained Boutin’s recorded consciousness, didn’t look up from his work. “Boutin was an unmodified human,” he said. “He was well into middle age when we knew him. He probably looked something like this guy when he was twenty. Minus the green skin, cat’s eyes and other modifications. And he probably wasn’t as fit as this body is. I know I wasn’t as fit in real life at age twenty as I am now. And I don’t even have to exercise.”
“You have a body engineered to take care of itself,” Robbins reminded Wilson.
“And thank God. I’m a doughnut fiend,” Wilson said.
“All you have to do to get it is get shot at by every other intelligent species in the universe,” Robbins said.
“That is the catch,” Wilson noted.
Robbins turned back to the body in the crèche. “All those changes won’t mess with the transfer of consciousness?”
“Shouldn’t,” Wilson said. “The genes relating to brain development are unaltered in this guy’s new genome. That’s Boutin’s brain in there. Genetically, at least.”
“And how does his brain look?” Robbins asked.
“It’s looks good,” Wilson said, tapping the monitor of the crèche controller. “Healthy. Prepared.”
“Think this will work?” Robbins asked.
“Got me,” Wilson said.
“Good to see we’re brimming with confidence,” Robbins said.
Wilson opened his mouth to respond but was interrupted as the door opened and Generals Mattson and Szilard stepped through, accompanied by three Special Forces decanting technicians. The techs went straight to the crèche; Mattson went to Robbins, who saluted along with Wilson.
“Tell me this is going to work,” Mattson said, returning the salute.
“Lieutenant Wilson and I were just talking about that,” Robbins said, after a nearly imperceptible pause.
Mattson turned to Wilson. “And, Lieutenant?”
Wilson pointed to the body in the crèche, being fussed over by the technicians. “The body is healthy, and so is the brain. The BrainPal is functioning perfectly, which is no surprise. We’ve been able to integrate Boutin’s consciousness pattern into the transfer machinery with surprisingly few problems, and the test runs we’ve done suggest there won’t be a problem with transmission. In theory, we should be able to transfer the consciousness like we do with any consciousness.”
“Your words sound confident, Lieutenant, but your voice doesn’t,” Mattson said.
“There are a lot of uncertainties, General,” Wilson said. “Usually the subject is conscious when he transfers over. That helps with the process. We don’t have that here. We won’t know whether the transfer is successful until we wake up the body. This is the first time we’ve tried a transfer without two brains involved. If it’s not actually Boutin’s consciousness in there, the pattern won’t take. Even if it is Boutin’s consciousness in there, there’s no guarantee it will imprint. We’ve done everything we can to assure a smooth transfer. You’ve read the reports. But there’s still so much involved that we don’t know about. We know all the ways it could go right, but not all the ways it could go wrong.”
“Do you think it will work or don’t you?” Mattson said.
“I think it will work,” Wilson said. “But we need to have a healthy respect for all the things we don’t know about what we’re doing. There’s a lot of room for error. Sir.”
“Robbins?” Mattson said.
“Lieutenant Wilson’s assessment seems right to me, General,” Robbins said.
The technicians finished their assessment and reported to General Szilard, who nodded and walked over to Mattson. “The techs say we’re ready,” Szilard said.
Mattson glanced at Robbins, then Wilson. “Fine,” he said. “Let’s get this over with.”
The Colonia
l Defense Special Forces build soldiers using a simple recipe: First, start with a human genome. Then subtract.
The human genome comprises roughly twenty thousand genes made from three billion base pairs, spread out over twenty-three chromosomes. Most of the genome is “junk”—portions of the sequence that do not code for anything in the final product of the DNA: a human being. Once nature puts a sequence into DNA it appears reluctant to remove it even if it does nothing at all.
Special Forces scientists are not nearly so precious. With each new body model they build, their first step is to strip out the redundant and switched-off genetic matter. What is left is a lean, mean, streamlined DNA sequence that is completely useless; editing the human genome destroys its chromosomal structure, leaving it unable to reproduce. But this is just a first step. Reassembling and replicating the new genome is several steps away.
The new, small DNA sequence features every gene that makes a human what he or she is, and this simply is not good enough. The human genotype does not allow the human phenotype the plasticity the Special Forces require, which is to say: Our genes can’t make the superhumans Special Forces soldiers need to be. What is left of the human genome is now rent apart, redesigned and reassembled to build the genes that will code for substantially enhanced abilities. This process can require the introduction of additional genes or genetic material. The genes that come from other humans usually present little problem with their incorporation, since the human genome is fundamentally designed to accommodate genetic information from other human genomes (the process by which this is usually, naturally and enthusiastically accomplished is called “sex”). Genetic material from other terrestrial species is also relatively easy to incorporate, seeing as all life on Earth features the same genetic building blocks and are related to each other genetically.
Incorporating genetic material from non-terrestrial species is substantially more difficult. Some planets evolved genetic structures roughly similar to Earth’s, incorporating some if not all the nucleotides involved in terrestrial genetics (perhaps not coincidentally, the intelligent species of these planets have been known to consume humans from time to time; the Rraey, for example, found humans quite tasty). But most alien species have genetic structures and components wildly different from terrestrial creatures. Using their genes is not a simple matter of cutting and pasting.