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| copyright 2025 Acacia Gallagher |
Cell 3C, ICC Detention Center, the Hague
Scheveningen, the Netherlands
This is a test. I’m failing, as usual.
Ha ha, that’s a joke. I am taking [redacted/HR-T1]’s advice and I’m starting from the beginning again to dictate my account of what happened to us east of Shaymak.
It started on Thursday. That’s the afternoon when we horsed around with the weapons in our armor. We had done this sort of thing before. As jokes, the Russians would try to push each other off cliffs. The suits stopped them. Either the first suit wouldn’t allow the push or the second one would stop it. The pieces of armor linked up to form a unit and the units talked to one another. The artificial intelligence embedded in each piece kept us from screwing up. Basically, it did what it was supposed to do. It kind of did what we were supposed to do, too.
Each section of leg armor had five layers. There was the inner lining, sensors and controls, the exoskeleton, more sensors and controls, and the skin. The armored skin and temperature sensitive lining are full of layers, too, but I’m going to ignore that so I can just say I was fucking amazed by the rest of the suit. There are gyroscopes, fiber optics, and an internal wire and pulley system between the sensors and the skeleton. Now, the collection of stuff may sound hodgepodge but, I’m telling you, it was fast. Our units had quicker reaction times than the human nervous system.
When we did what the suits expected, we were world-class athletes. When we did ordinary things, we were ordinary. And when we did something contrary to our suit expectations, we had seizures, brief ones, before the suits recalibrated. The suits did give in to what we wanted. We weren’t puppets. On the other hand, the seizures tended to train us. They’re not comfortable. They push hard against your ligaments and tendons. You learn to avoid them, which means the suit AIs have a lot of control.
“Jasna! Jasna!” Zielinski screamed in Polish when his rifle auto-loaded. “Holy shit,” is what a lot of the guys were saying as we tested the suits after they had joined with the weapons. Of course, when we were surprised, a lot of our words came out in different languages. We were Canadians, Ethiopians, Mexicans, and Poles. We had Ukranian and Russian supervisors. There were a few other groups represented, but I’d say that was our basic mix.
Thing is, no one spoke Tajik. Really, no one. The Russians had taught everyone to swear in their lingo but that was about it. I thought the names of our two youngest scouts were Opezdol and Eblan because, for a week, I couldn’t figure out they were constantly calling each other the closest equivalents to “Hey Stupid!” and “Fucking Idiot!”
My second language is French because I grew up in Ottawa but honestly, I got Cs and Ds every year. I dreaded the school trips to Quebec because everyone could see what a dummy I was. That’s how I felt in the rail scouts. Even after months of other languages with them, I have to stick to English.
Everyone else in the scouts, though, spoke English and something else. That’s why English was the official language of our ITB branch. My helmet spoke eleven languages. It was smarter than me. I’m not sure if I could have beaten my ammo in checkers.
“Well, now,” said one of the Russians. “We are some dumb guys in smart suits.”
“Hokay, Opezdoli!” shouted Kaspar. “Six groups I am assigning to you. Look to your suit comms. Get together with the teammates listed on your screen. Practice.”
“Practice what?”
Kaspar shrugged. “We are only going to march to the temple and back. Show those monks that we are not to be scared from our mission.”
“So we practice walking?”
“How about make sure we don’t shoot ourselves?” said Negasi, one of the Ethiopians. “We are ten pounds heavier. But we do not trip. We do not fire our guns like fools. Do not let us look stupid.”
“You are a group leader, Negasi.”
“This is good, boss.”
“Zielinski, Negasi, Petrov, Sokolov, and Mendez, pick your practice areas. Get your groups together and go through some drills. My work gang, come here to me. Now.”
“How about target practice, boss?” Sokolov raised his hand. There was a rifle in it.
“If you want, yes. Tell your smart ammo that it is practice otherwise it will get too smart, yes? And fire it into the ground.”
“Da.” The Russian radio engineer nodded. He was not a practical joker or a weapons enthusiast. He was just a methodical guy. The group leaders were generally like him, picked from the best workers, except maybe for mine, Szymon Zielinski.
Don’t get me wrong, I liked Szymon. He liked me back. His uniform suit was crap, though, and it was worse before I made some basic fixes and swapped his left arm out for a unit with feature compatibility. That’s a problem with equipment that has different versions and patch levels in the software. Szymon was sloppy. He’d picked pieces that looked nice, not ones that worked well. He was good with people and he was kind of senior in the Polish contingent. That’s why he got selected.
“Hey, we have Mister Cruzak repairman!” he shouted. He greeted me with a big hug as I joined his group. “We are very lucky!”
He was slapping me on the back in a few seconds. So were the other Poles. Someone put a drink in my hand. Those fuckers had alcohol available at all times, somehow. I have to admit, they got me laughing with them.
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