Soul Bound

1          Soul Bound

1.2        Taking Control

1.2.5      An Idiosyncratic Interlude

1.2.5.6    Potentially militarised suppression targets

Bahrudin did something at the laptop, and it switched to showing a 3D map of where the drones were, with three squares to the left showing point-of-view shots from the A team and three more to the right of the map showing the B team. At the top it said, “Tutorial Mode”. Out in the pasture, the dwarves were accustoming themselves to the orglife overlay provided by the goggles and working out the hand gestures used to set flight-path parameters for the drones or steer them directly.

Nadine: “I’m impressed with how practised you are with that. Have you done this before?”

Bahrudin grinned crookedly: “I had Terah talk me through the possibilities last night, and we planned this afternoon’s exercise together. He’s making me look good.”

The picture on the screen morphed to show the avatar of her steward, Terah, leaning on his shepherd’s crook. He bowed directly to Nadine before nodding to Bahrudin, obviously aware of their locations. A moment later the picture morphed back to appearing to be a dumb application interface.

Bahrudin: “Actually Muhamed’s the one who’s done this before. His military experience is much more recent than mine. When I retired, ‘boots on the ground’ was still a thing. I never carried out inhumane combat.”

Muhamed, slightly wounded, corrected him: “That’s ‘inhuman centered engagements’, or ICE. Any contest for ground supremacy where the humans are not physically present on the battlefield.”

Bahrudin: “I prefer my way of putting it. Too often humans are physically present. They’re ‘just’ civilians or potentially militarised suppression targets.”

She decided to divert the discussion before they really started arguing. Besides, Muhamed rarely spoke much - this was too good an opportunity to miss.

Nadine put an admiring tone in her voice: “Muhamed, is that how you became such a good shot and learned to move through woods so well?”

Muhamed leaned back in his chair, thinking, and didn’t answer for twenty seconds or so. When he did, his voice was distant and detached.

Muhamed: “I like the woods. They’re quiet and you can take things at your own pace. No pressure. When I came home to the village, after, I brought a focus back with me as a memento. Technically it was obsolete and non-functional. Well, any drone gets non-functional if you disconnect the power supply, and the lass in charge of supply was a mate of mine.”

Nadine: “A focus?”

Muhamed: “A drone able to focus its senses upon a single long-range target, like a telescope or parabolic microphone. Has a low return profile, active camo and ultra-quiet fans. Doesn’t move fast, but it is stealthy enough to slip into enemy territory. You can use them for advance scouting, but mainly they’re used for sniping high value targets. To use one well, you plan your covert lines of retreat in advance. Shoot, then move. Shoot, then move.”

He mimed the action with his hand, after which he stopped talking and went back to watching the dwarves learning drone control. The two teams had arranged themselves into V-shaped formations and were now flying through an orglife obstacle course, competing to get faster times. Just when she thought he’d say no more, he continued.

Muhamed: “There are some parts of advance scouting, though, that can’t be done remotely. Human Information Assets talk better to you in person. They want a show of trust, want to feel valued, want a personal relationship with their handler. I spent many nights out in the woods, waiting for contacts, worrying about smart mine fields.”

Bahrudin: “In my time, a mine was a mine, and it blew up or not depending just upon its own sensors. Once you found the edge of a field, you could bash around with a heavy metal roller pushed by a tank until you exploded them all, one by one.”

Muhamed nodded: “Smart mines can talk to each other. The controller can send a secure cryptographic signal to explode or temporarily deactivate some or all of them. If a mine near the edge of the field detects tremors of a footstep the field might wait until your whole patrol is strung out then spike a quick active scan before simultaneously exploding devices near to each intruder, leaving anyone watching still no idea where the safe perimeter is.”

Muhamed: “Normally you’d use a ball of burrowing snake drones to de-mine a field like that, but I discovered that with patience I could use my focus to make a good guess on whether something was buried or not. Over the last five years I’ve cleared every wood near our village that children might play in. The venison and rabbits are just a by-product.”

Nadine: “When I arrived here you showed me which woods were safe to gather herbs from. I didn’t realise how much the village owes you.”

Muhamed: “It is my choice not to speak much of those times. Everyone has their own grim memories. They do not need mine in addition to their own.”

Nadine: “How do you feel about being back in a uniform? Is it ok? Or does it bring too much back?”

Muhamed gave his Crookes Radiometer a thoughtful polish with his sleeve: “Ms MacQuarrie is very kind. She has made sure these do not look too military. I approve. I shall forge some bright memories to associate with them.”

Muhamed was silent after that, and the three of them peaceably watched the dwarves gain competence in their drone handling. After a while Bahrudin called a halt and swapped Muhamed onto Harun’s team in exchange for David, then switched exercise. The new task involved the teams taking turns using a net strung between the three team members to try to capture any of the opposing team. Luckily Heather’s drones used modern gradated ceramics for the fan blades, and when fouled they only stalled rather than shattering.

People sometimes shattered too, didn’t they? She thought about the effect that war had had upon Muhamed, upon Bulgaria and Wellington and upon her parents. Did she even understand what she’d be asking, if she got womble followers into a struggle against the great powers of this world? It felt intrusive to bring up the topic, here on this peaceful pasture, but she couldn’t duck the question if she wanted to make responsible decisions.

Nadine: “David, you were a doctor. What’s known about how war affects people? Is modern combat any different in that respect, from when people used swords and muskets? This looks terribly detached; almost like a lacrosse match. No visible blood or gore.”

David: “Hmm. I don’t know all that much about it, though I spent decades treating people who lived through periods of war. The reactions varied enormously. Some just shrug it off; others were entirely changed. Some ended up beset by demons, others became stronger for it. I can say that, for most of the people I saw, it wasn’t the horror of seeing dead bodies, the loss of comrades or even the personal physical danger they faced that caused the worst long-term problems.”

Nadine: “Oh? What was the #1 cause?”

David: “Killing someone. Knowing that you had cut short the life of someone, probably someone much like the neighbouring kids you grew up with, and that you could never regain that virginity, never go back to being someone who wasn’t a killer. Accepting that you’d adapted, that you’d changed into the sort of person you needed to be in order to get the job done or just fit in and survive under those circumstances. Coming to terms with changing how you felt about certain things, perhaps feelings which you’d have considered ‘wrong’ back in your previous life.”

Bahrudin: “And then returning to a civilian life where people didn’t respect the changes you made to survive, didn’t understand them and didn’t approve of them. Where the people you’d tried to protect ended up fearing you, seeing you as the threat to be outcast. Damaged goods. A monster. And you question yourself: maybe they’re right? But you can’t talk about it, can’t ask for help, and end up feeling isolated.”

Definitely! Especially in cultures like the one she lived surrounded by, where even to themselves men pretended that they never felt vulnerable or experienced self doubt, because they all heard tales of men exposing their weakness in a moment of drunken honesty, and of their years of suffering under a scorn so severe that only a fool would risk it.

She was already opening her mouth to voice the thought when she caught herself. It might be taken as an accusation of weakness, damnit. She wasn't safe to use words, even when just talking about it generally. Actually hugging Bahrudin would likely cause a fatal injury to the pride that was as a part of him as any of limbs. The whole topic was a taboo! She didn't like accepting that but for now, despite feeling a horrible compulsion to keep poking, she'd just had to accept that it was as dangerous to enter as any monstrous mechanical minefield. She nodded to herself as she overcame the temptation, and diverted the discussion away from feelings, towards a topic that as an NCO she hoped he’d find it easier to talk about.

Nadine: “Isn’t that what training is for? To get soldiers used to pulling the trigger?”

Bahrudin: “It used to be. After World War II American researchers discovered that, when spotting an enemy who’d exposed themselves, only 15% of allied riflemen had actually fired with the intention of hitting the enemy soldier. So they changed their training methods. A soldier in boot camp would progress from shooting at abstract targets to more and more realistic ones. The enemy were referred to as ‘gooks’ or other things, in an attempt to make them seem less like the people the soldier grew up with, less human. Repetition was emphasised so that, when the rational part of the brain froze, the default action would be to shoot. And in its way it worked. By the Vietnam war, 95% would actually shoot to kill.”

David: “I didn’t realise the change was that big. I do know a bit about the brain freezing. Doctors go through a lot of exposure to injured bodies and stressful decisions in training, to desensitise their response to it. Otherwise, their heart rate shoots up and they panic the first time they find themselves in charge of an emergency surgical operation. The body’s ‘fight or flight’ response drains blood away from extremities, to reduce bleeding in the event of injury, and that includes draining it away from certain parts of the brain involved with rationality and memory.”

“Of course,” he added, “too much desensitisation is also a bad thing - it erodes empathy. It makes it harder to model how those who have not gone through our experiences will react the first time, because we don’t fully realise how much we’ve changed, and we based our predictions off how we’d react in the same situation now, having had our experiences.”

What? She blinked, trying to parse David’s words. Maybe she should have worn her tiara? No, damnit, she could cope without getting a boost. 24 hours. She was going to spend 24 hours without going back online, just to prove to herself that she still could. She dragged the conversation back on track, turning to Bahrudin.

Nadine: “What did you mean ‘in its way’?”

Bahrudin: “Someone who kills an armed intruder in self-defence rarely has nightmares over the morality of their own actions. Someone who accidentally ends up shooting an innocent civilian in the crossfire, a young child, or has to decide whether to drop a bomb near captive soldiers from his own side that are being held hostage - they get far more problems. And, in the middle, you get soldiers who kill an enemy without thinking, because of their training, rather than because they decided it was the right thing to do.”

Nadine: “So in terms of psychological trauma after the war is over, the time-efficient mass-production of soldiers ready to kill is counter productive, because it increases the fraction who do things they later regret, that they might not have done if they’d fully considered their actions?”

Bahrudin shrugged: “More or less. But you get that mostly when armies are being filled with conscripts. When you vastly reduce the size of your army, because most of the actual fighting is carried out by unmanned units controlled by expert systems, the soldiers remaining are highly paid and educated professionals who want the job. No more rape and looting, no more watching your fellow soldiers bleed out through lack of medical supplies, everything monitored by incorruptible expert systems matching the soldiers’ behaviour against a policy set by their generals. Clinical. Inhuman. At least on the winning side.”

David: “Did you know most big countries and corporations, the ones who still bother to have their own military rather than hire one, have got rid of their chaplains? They say they don’t need them any longer. That bothers me for some reason, but I can’t put my finger on it.”

The mention of chaplains reminded her of Uncle Hrvoje‘s funeral, and what had been said about fear pushing people into being less than human. The problem wasn’t just the enemy being treated as inconvenient objects; it was also when your own side thought of you as just another cog in the machine, moulded you into being one.