1.1 Monday Bloody Monday

Steve killed for the first time the day after he joined the army.

There had been no delay for training, or even to be outfitted and shipped off to a far foreign country. That was the beauty of the Telepresence Cavalry: the Pentagon could cherry-pick their recruits from the nation’s top gamers, already as well-trained and combat ready as they’d ever be thanks to years of pretend violence. The robots they’d be riding herd on, meanwhile, were already in the battlespace, packed up tight inside ground effect carriers floating off the coast, just a short flight from deployment.

His ‘bot, an M-2053 Remote Armored Ground Vehicle (Insectile), was still in the air when he grabbed the reins, attached to the belly of an A-280 Mulehawk. Flying in loose formation were three other A-280s, carrying the rest of 3 platoon, Bravo Company, 6^th Armored Telepresence Cavalry.

The battlenet gave Steve – and all of the other ‘botriders – an audiovisual feed from each of the RAGVIs: inside the interface, his field of vision bore a passing resemblance to what an insect would see through compound eyes, the world fragmented into twenty viewpoints arranged around the central feed from his own ‘bot, each of them labeled with its rider’s callsign. At the moment they differed only in displacement: all showed the vast green carpet of the Congo’s jungle, racing by beneath, broken by the thick brown ribbon of the Congo River. The airspace above the jungle swarmed with aircraft. In the far distance, behind them, the tenuous glow of the festering hive that was the East African coast, the thin blue line of the Atlantic beyond.

"Listen up, hotshots,” Lieutenant Marcos’ voice broke through without warning, as clear as though they were all sitting in the same room, rather than separated by oceans and continents. “A lot of you – hell, most of you – this is your first combat op. I know y’all’ve been gamin’ sims since ‘fore y’all could walk, an’ as a result y’all think you’re experts. Maybe you are, maybe you’re not. We’ll find out in a few minutes, either way. Just keep in mind, this is for real. You’re in the saddle of real machines. Firing real weapons. At real people. Keep that in mind ‘fore you authorize a kill.”

Steve licked his lips. “Yessir,” he said, in more-or-less unison with the rest of 3 platoon. There was none of the ‘Sir-yes-sir’ speaking-with-one-voice nonsense that his forebears might have used: discipline of that kind wasn’t necessary in a telepresence cavalry, and like all adaptations that had lost their usefulness, it had been dropped in a remarkably short time.

He knew enough to know that that sort of break with tradition rankled officers like Marcos, men who still had to enter the combat zone and put their lives on the line, and thought discipline was more than just a quaint habit from the twencen. Marcos was the platoon’s IC, but his role was only nominally a leadership one: he was really there as more of a combat mechanic.

Still, to the el-tee’s credit, he didn’t let it show. “Enough of that. They make me say it for legal purposes. Y’all know what we’re here for. Folks down in that jungle figure they can do more or less as they please to one another. They’ve been fuckin’ up each others shit for generations now. They’ve got no government, no laws, no goddamn order, an’ as a result they’re playin’ host to some dangerous, evil sumbitches. I don’t have to tell y’all how much is at stake here.

“Drop’s in thirty seconds. Let’s kick some ass.”

The drop, when it came, was sudden. One after another, the povs of the RAGVIs lurched as they detached from the A-280s and fell like lawn darts towards the jungle. Tracer fire from a handful of different sources erupted, managing to take down two of the drop vehicles before their lethal cargo could land. The rest corkscrewed through computer-controlled trajectories that were almost impossible to track, and almost guaranteed to bring each RAGVI down in a tactically optimal position: in this case, as part of an ellipsoid formation, a noose around what intel said was a likely enemy base.

Steve’s own drop vehicle crashed through the canopy like a bullet through crumpled kleenex, coming to a rest in the jungle floor with an abruptness that would have broken him in any number of ways had he been physically present. As soon as it hit ground, the raggy was already scrambling out of the drop vehicle, spraying up shock gel in its haste, sensor package whipping around in search of targets.

Incredibly, he’d come down almost right on top of a small knot of men, dressed in ragged combat greens and carrying weapons that would have been at the bleeding edge half a decade before. One was shouting orders, while the others did their best to follow them: taking firing positions, attempting to establish a perimeter.

Steve sent the RAGVI into a dip in the ground, where its low-slung form would have cover. Some team of geniuses operating out of San Jose and Shenzhen had made significant improvements in actuator design, just in time for them to be incorporated into the blueprints of the latest generation of raggies. As a result Steve’s machine moved faster than his opponents expected: depleted uranium pelted the empty drop vehicle, and the explosions of microgrenades finished the job, reducing it to scrap. Steve indicated the four men in the firing group, and authorized the drone to deal with them; obligingly, it reared up on four of its legs and sent each target a swarm of explosive seeker rounds from its chaingun. By the time it was back under cover, there were three corpses and a screaming, legless man where once a threat had been.

Those were Steve’s first kills. At the time, he didn’t pause to think about it. He was too busy moving to get into formation with the rest of the platoon.

Steve was fifteen years old.