Battalion 1

Rhodes walked through The Grid looking around at everything—which was nothing.

The green lines and black squares passed under his feet. The grid lines and squares passed all around him and above him. The Grid moved behind him, but this bizarre landscape never changed.

“So….is Neiland still here somewhere?” he asked Fisher.

“The system interface records all your sensory input data for later processing,” Fisher replied. “It allows the doctors and technicians to make any necessary modifications to the….”

“Do me a favor, okay, pal? Don’t ever use the word, ‘processing’ again. It doesn’t mean anything.”

Fisher cocked his head to one side. Rhodes couldn’t tell why he considered this program a male, but he did.

Fisher cocked his head in a very birdlike way. Something in the way he blinked his eyelids too quickly reminded Rhodes of a bird even though Fisher wasn’t one.

Fisher’s face migrated off to one side of Rhodes’s view of The Grid. Then Fisher’s face got smaller and moved up into the top righthand corner of Rhodes’s view. Fisher didn’t block Rhodes from seeing anything around him—which was nothing.

“So what the hell are we doing out here?” Rhodes grumbled. “Nothing is happening.”

Fisher tilted his head the other way. “Your implants are all functioning correctly. I don’t believe you’ve activated The Grid yet.”

“What does that mean? How am I supposed to activate The Grid? It looks like it’s already activated.”

“This is just the base layer—the underlying matrix that forms The Grid. Once you activate it, it will feed you more information….”

“Just tell me how to activate it.”

“I’m sorry, but I can’t tell you that. Only you can activate it.”

Rhodes groaned and rolled his eyes to Heaven. “Great. What exactly are you supposed to do—and don’t tell me you’re supposed to help me process anything.”

“Try running.”

“What good will that do? You said walking would help.”

“Just try running. What harm can it do?”

Rhodes sighed and started running through The Grid. He didn’t expect anything different to happen.

As soon as he started running, it did change. The grid lines morphed and altered their shape the same way Fisher’s face did in the beginning.

The lines adjusted, bent, and angled upward, downward, and in every other direction. The squares reformed into mountains, trees, roads, buildings, and even a river flowing past.

The Grid landscape started as an outline of all those squares stretching into different forms. Then colors appeared and Rhodes found himself running through a landscape.

It looked as real as any he’d ever seen—except that his implants kept overlaying The Grid on everything. The squares and lines fed tons of information to Rhodes about the angle and trajectory of everything.

The Grid constantly adjusted itself in synch with Rhodes’s movements. The grid lines even covered Rhodes himself.

“Where are we?” he asked Fisher.

“This is a simulated Grid landscape used for training. Stay watchful. The system will send you obstacles and adversaries to….”

Before he finished speaking, a Viper missile ruptured out of one of the nearby buildings. The Viper whistled straight for Rhodes’s head.

He dove to one side and realized he was reacting too fast. He wouldn’t have been able to avoid that missile in real life.

“Your implants are all processing data within normal parameters,” Fisher told him. “Be careful. The training session is starting. You’ll be entering the battle training sequence any second now.”

Rhodes didn’t have time to ask what that meant or what to expect. The Grid adjusted again and the landscape changed around him a second time—except that it wasn’t the second time. It kept changing again and again in rapid succession.

The grid lines contorted and reformed. The mountains surrounding what looked like a town got bigger and then changed to enormous battleships.

The buildings Rhodes had just been running between morphed into giant alien creatures with horns, multiple eyes, and lashing tentacles.

The grid lines fed all that information into Rhodes’s implants faster than he could think. The Grid kept shifting and changing shape, but it also responded to his senses.

It reacted to his thoughts even before he had a chance to think them. He couldn’t tell anymore if they were sending him information or if he was controlling them from inside his own head. Was there even a difference anymore?

Gunfire erupted from somewhere and Rhodes’s instincts took over. Some part of him already knew how to use the weapons installed on his implants.

He raised his arm and fired his scourge gun at one of the giant aliens—right at the place where the gunfire would have come from if the creature had been a building.

The scourge gun ejected a burst of some kind of energy Rhodes didn’t recognize. A jet of whitish-purple electricity or maybe plasma forked out of the port on his arm.

At the same moment, the booster rockets on his legs activated without him even trying—but he did try. He did it without thinking. He already knew how to use his implants.

He launched off the ground and took off racing through the landscape. His senses picked up sights, sounds, and details faster than he could decide to read them.

The grid lines superimposed themselves on the landscape’s surface. He saw them and didn’t see them at the same time.

He didn’t understand what was happening to him, but his implants merged all this information into a torrent of reactions and certainties that somehow made sense.

The information made sense to his implants even when it didn’t make sense to him.

He maneuvered past hills, buildings, ships, and other attackers with no effort or thought at all. He swooped along the river heading closer to what looked like another cluster of buildings ahead.

The Grid adjusted in front of his eyes with every direction change and subtle head movement. The lines showed him from a distance that the buildings were about to change into more alien monsters.

Without thinking about it first, he released two seeker missiles from the ports on his elbows. They corkscrewed across the landscape and detonated the buildings to smithereens.

The landscape vanished instantly. All the mountains, buildings, roads, and attackers dissolved.

Rhodes powered down his boosters and landed on his feet on the tile floor in the white room next to Dr. Neiland.

Fisher didn’t go away. His face stayed there in the upper righthand corner of Rhodes’s view.

“That was excellent,” Dr. Neiland told him in her usual steady undertone. “You mastered that perfectly. You’ll enter The Grid every time you go into battle. The Grid adjusts how you process sensory data from your implants. Fisher will help you by alerting you to dangers and communicating with you about other information you might find necessary. Do you understand now?”

Rhodes nodded, but he barely saw her. “Yeah. I understand now.”

“You’ll undergo a more detailed training session tomorrow where you and Fisher can explore some of The Grid’s finer nuances.”

“What does that mean?” Rhodes asked.

“I would have to show you for you to understand. Our protocol calls for you to process this session first. You can return to your barracks and relax for the rest of the day.”

Rhodes grimaced at her. He was really starting to hate the whole concept of processing anything.

Dr. Neiland led the way outside where she split off to a different part of the station. Rhodes headed for the barracks. Fisher still didn’t go away.

Rhodes came to the station’s central concourse, but instead of going back to the barracks, he turned in a different direction to explore another part of the station.

“You aren’t authorized to enter this part of the station, Captain,” Fisher told him.

“Did I ask you? Isn’t there any way to shut you off?”

“I’m afraid not, Captain. Once activated, I will continue to serve my function as your SAM. I can’t be shut off.”

“Fan flippin’ tastic,” Rhodes snarled under his breath. “If you won’t shut yourself off, at least be quiet. I don’t need you commenting on everything I do.”

“That is my function, Captain. My function is to alert you to dangers and potential risks in your environment.”

“Do you see any dangers or potential risks in my environment?” Rhodes demanded.

“You’re risking your position as commander of Battalion 1 by contravening your authority to enter this part of the station.”

Rhodes snorted at him again. “I’m not risking anything, pal. I didn’t ask for this. What the hell do I care if they make someone else commander of Battalion 1? I didn’t ask for you, either, so do me a favor and keep your mouth shut.”

Fisher didn’t say anything for a while. He just hovered there at the corner of Rhodes’s eye.

Rhodes explored a few sections of the station’s power plant, the personnel quarters, and even the loading dock. Ships of all shapes and sizes came and went from there.

He stayed out much longer than he otherwise would have. He just wanted to spite Fisher. No one was going to tell him what to do, especially not some computer program installed in his brain.

Rhodes eventually got bored and wandered back to the barracks.

“I didn’t ask for this, either, Captain,” Fisher murmured on the way.

Rhodes didn’t answer. He shouldn’t have gone off on this program.

The frustration and hopeless despair of his situation escalated to the breaking point. Why couldn’t the Legion just come out and ask him point blank to join this project? He might have been able to tolerate that.

The sensation of these implants attached to his body was becoming excruciating. It didn’t hurt—not physically.

The feeling of them embedded in his flesh drove him out of his mind. He wanted to claw them out with his bare hands even if it left him bleeding, paralyzed, or dead.

He just wanted to go back to the way he was before. He wanted to feel normal.

He couldn’t communicate any of that to anyone.

Now he had this thing floating in front of his eyes and listening to his every thought. Never in a million years would Rhodes confide how he felt to Fisher. That would be the day.

Rhodes returned to the barracks to find Colonel Kraft waiting for him. Kraft stood by the table where a black metal box sat next to his elbow.

“Colonel?” Rhodes greeted him. “What can I do for you?”

Kraft tapped the box. “This box contains all your personal effects from your posting with the Legion. Your old platoon just forwarded it here for you. The rest of your belongings have been sent onward to your family on Preinea. The Battalion 1 project calls for the member recruits’ families to be informed of their deaths, either in combat or otherwise. I’m sorry, Captain.”

Kraft walked out of the barracks and left those words ringing in Rhodes’s ears. His family….informed of his death….

His family on Preinea thought he was dead. The Legion told them he was dead….so the Legion could revive him as this…..this machine.

He stared at the box. He already knew what was in it.

Some magnetic force pulled him toward it. Whatever shred of his humanity he might have left was in this box right now. He had to see it—just once.

He opened the box and looked inside. Three medals in a frame, a folded flag, a small wooden ball, and a string of blown-glass beads on a thin, flexible wire—what did they even mean anymore?

These could have belonged to anyone—any dead person. No one besides him would ever know what these things meant.

He carried each memory in his head. No one else would ever know what these random objects meant, where they came from, or what they were worth. They weren’t worth anything—except to him.

He took the last item out of the box and looked down at a picture of himself, his wife, and their children. His wife was smiling with her arms around Rhodes. She kissed him on the cheek while he laughed at the camera.

The image of one of his sons had blurred. The boy had been horsing around too much so the image only caught him as a smear of movement.

Rhodes’s daughter squirmed in his arms while she grinned at the camera. Rhodes’s other son sat close to his mother with his arms around her waist.

Fisher cocked his head to one side, but he didn’t look down at the picture. He always faced Rhodes no matter what Rhodes was doing. “Who are they?” Fisher asked.

Rhodes didn’t answer. Fisher saw everything Rhodes saw. Fisher shared all of Rhodes’s thoughts and feelings. Nothing happened in Rhodes’s head that Fisher didn’t share.

Fisher might even be able to see each memory attached to every item in this box. If the SAM recorded all of Rhodes’s sensory input data, why not his memories, too?

Rhodes tossed the picture back into the box, took a step away from the table, aimed his forearm at the box, and fired his thermal cannon at it.

The plastic didn’t ignite right away. He had to bombard the box for a full minute before the plastic started to melt.

As soon as it did, the oily goo of its liquifying walls burst into flame. He kept firing until he incinerated the box to ash along with everything inside it.

End of Chapter 5.