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BY DAVID WELLINGTON

For a while it looked like the robots were going to win our wars for us

I believed it After what I saw in Syria, back in 2012, sure I was e down the Blue Zone there We were rolling in a lead vehicle that was six kilometers outside Damascus when its brakes locked up The driver looked as surprised as I was A canned voice from the dashboard told us the vehicle had been halted automatically because an IED had been detected I&039;ve been doing this long enough that those three little letters madewhite beard and a skullcap was driving a flock of overheated sheep across the dusty road, urging them on, out of the way of the hundred tons of olive-drab depleted-uraniu a plastic carrier bag, and he&039;d dropped it in the middle of the road, as if he was too distracted by the sheep to worry about his lunch

They still get you like that, so attention

&039;Don&039;t worry, Ms Flores We&039;re all good&039; The driver gave ive to journalists, that practised, cockeyed set the news

&039;What do you do now?&039; I asked the driver &039;Call in a sweeper teah this routine before It could be an hour before the IED was disabled and the road cleared for travel again, and I had a deadline to ers behind his head He was a kid, like all the soldiers I h school He had bad acne on his cheeks, and his first tattoo, on the back of his hand, was still bright enough to look like a cartoon &039;The Silverhawk&039;ll get it&039;

The Silverhawk Unmanned Aerial-Weapon Platfors and an MTHEL slung under its gondola It was designed to operate above the cloud layer, loitering forWhen an alar station, the Silverhawk slowly caet soery to find traces of plastic explosive in the plastic bag ere all watching so intently I never saw the Silverhawk, nor the officer who confirmed the strike, nor even the pencil-thin beam of the MTHEL, a deuteriu to a couple of thousand degrees for a split second - long enough tonoise I could hear through the Stryker&039;s up-arht plume of smoke jumped into the air

&039;Jesus,&039; I said &039;That&039;s it? That was so easy&039;

&039;Hold on,&039; the driver told me &039;Silverhawk&039;s a two-shot platfor at us with a look of dawning realization The old man tried to run He made it maybe a dozen meters before his head burst open in a cloud of superheated blood I tried not to react I&039;d seen people die before, after all

Eventually the suddenly unsupervised sheep started heading one by one for a line of distant hills

&039;Our CO tells us,&039; the driver let et about a hundred and twenty of &039;em airborne over Damascus, we could have another Green Zone here before the year&039;s out Then we can get rotated out, go ho on the success of the faon had staked the future of warfare on the robots, and for good reason They were inhuood at their job They didn&039;t have to be fed or killed, and their operators could run them from safe observation bases half a world away They could be sent into places no huet killed, nobody shed a tear My driver loved theht? Except you, s for you to take pictures of&039;

But of course there was another market adjustment that year A bad one The robots that were supposed to win our ere too expensive Only three Silverhawk UAWPs were built before the project ran out ofout of e needed to fight The Dah back-hoetting bigger every time a plane full of human remains came back from the Middle East So another way had to be found A cheaper way - and when it co people, there&039;s always a cheaper way

As long as you have a strong-enough stomach

The first tiineers in haz Base in backcountry Muzhikistan, far enough away I didn&039;t notice anything strange about their bright yellow outfits They were off-loading a cargo he licopter, stacking crates in a warehouse and then going back for more They moved with almost painful slowness and erous or unstable

It was the kind of thing I would file away for later, soh, I figured it could wait I was done with my time at that particular FOB I&039;d already worked up the story I&039;d come for: the field medical kits issued to our soldiers in Muzhikistan were full of expiredwith depressing regularity in 2019, when the new Green Party Congress was slashing every part of the defence budget they could get their hands on I was sitting at an outdoor officers&039;for one last intervieith the colonel who had approved shipping out the substandard kits I was ready to file, but I figured I&039;d give him one last chance to rebut before I fired my copy off to New York After all, as soon as this ca block

He entyto think I&039;d been stood up I&039;d long since finished offoverheated, even in the shade of a picnic u upback to the men dressed all in yellow over by the helipads They ht they were just being careful with their cargo, but it wasn&039;t just that There was a certain sameness to their movements Each of them bent exactly so from the knees before they lifted a crate, and they all lifted at exactly the saraphed As if they weren&039;t individual people at all, but soize but I was held up in a briefing&039; The colonel loo out some of the central Asian sun I blinked a couple of times and smiled up at him &039;I&039;m afraid I&039;ll need to make this quick&039;

&039;No problem,&039; I said &039;I just wanted to know if you had anything else to say&039;

He grunted &039;Anything more to damn myself with, you mean&039; He knew aboutsecret for long in an environossip and boredooods on hiressional hearing As soon as my story went in, his career was over He&039;d be lucky if he avoided jail time &039;I&039;m not sure why you&039;ve decided to destroyI&039;ve done ell in line with the orders I received fro crash from over by the helipads I darted my head around to see what had happened The yellow-suitedaround one of the crates that had fallen on the tarmac and broken open The men in yellow didn&039;t seem to knohat to do next They just stood in place, not even looking at the limpse of as inside the crate

&039;Ms Flores, please, I must insist you stay back,&039; the colonel shouted at round already I was trying to fasten my video camera to the epaulet on my left shoulder at the same time as I pressed my bone-conduction microphone to the bottorabbed ain

&039;This is a restricted area, Ms Flores&039;

I didn&039;t care

A human arm had slid out of the cracked-open side of the fallen crate An arht yellow plastic, exactly the same shade as the hazmat suits the handlers wore As I took another step closer, the crate sagged and one end popped open, and three bodies in yellow suits slid out onto the blazing concrete of the helipad

The handlers, the ones standing around, didn&039;t look surprised to learn they&039;d been carrying coffins They didn&039;t make any move to put the bodies back in the crate, either

I reached up to my shoulder to switch on the camera Before I could reach it the colonel ripped it off round

&039;Sorry Vital national-security interests at stake&039;

I gave him my best hard-boiled journalist stare, but it didn&039;t faze hiet back Get these fuckers back, will you?&039; soain toward the scene of the accident, I saw a soldier in sergeant&039;s stripes pushing his way through the crowd of yellow suits He wasn&039;t wearing sowhat looked like the controller for a very elaborate video-game console He tapped out a simple command on the buttons and stared at the yellow suits around hirabbed the bodies under their shoulders They dragged them fully out of the crate and laid theeant tapped some more buttons, and the yellow suits stepped back and away

Then the bodies started to twitch A hand lifted here A leg kicked out there One by one they sat up, slowly, stiffly One by one they got carefully up on their feet

Then the three of them - three men who I had been certain were just corpses a minute before - bent and picked up the pieces of the crate they&039;d been shipped in Without a word or any kind of spoken order, they carried the pieces into the ware house, then went back to the he licopter to get another, unbroken crate

The sergeant headed back into the warehouse as if nothing strange had happened at all The yellow suits went back to ithout a word

It was about that time I really took a hard look at those hazht For one thing there were no hoses sticking out of the hoods, no air supplies hanging off of belts, no Velcro flaps up the back for easy access Most startlingly, there were no faceplates The yellow suits covered the workers from head to foot, every inch of them, without a seam The yellow plastic covered their faces without a break Not even any eyeholes There was no way the people inside the suits could see out No way they could see what they were doing

I turned to look at the colonel

&039;You going to tell me what I just saw?&039; I asked

The army trains its officers very well to keep their secrets

But then again, I was trained to figure them out anyway

&039;Come on,&039; I said &039;You know I&039;ll find out eventually&039; We had retired to the icy darkness of his office, acontainer It had a table that folded down fro chairs, and a very noisy air-conditioning unit that I wanted to sit on all day &039;My agency will file a Freedom of Inforolf with every Saturday If none of that works, I&039;ll just flood the blogs with rumors until every UFO nut and survivalist fro on&039;

The colonel poured hilass of mineral water that fizzed noisily, and then he sipped at it He didn&039;t offer me a drink

&039;I don&039;t knohat you think you saw, Ms Flores,&039; he toldthe off-loading of a helicopter No one was hurt, and no equip you would bother putting your byline over What could you possibly ith this?&039;

I folded my aroing to get this story It ot so brand neant a full explanation You go ahead and clear it with the Pentagon, whatever you need to do But I want facts, I want figures and na out in the field, I want to go with the with them I don&039;t believe for a second that you&039;ve invented soo&039;

&039;I suppose you&039;re right,&039; he ad back in his chair &039;Soet to tell this story Eventually But it won&039;t be you&039;

&039;Uh huh&039; I knehat that e hison,&039; I said, &039;the one I spent six weeks here for - it&039;s going to go badly for certain people when it gets out I can&039;t just bury it, of course: I have ave ht my professional sensibilities orth

&039;But it doesn&039;t have to go out right away I could call my editor, tell him that some of et theht&039;

The smile on his face was frozen solid

&039;He&039;d be willing to wait a while Maybe even thirty days Which would give certain people a little more time to cover their asses&039;

The set to his rank in the ar how to uing with me He knew I had hi out a detail to run counterinsurgency operations too with us Under certain conditions&039;

&039;Like?&039;

&039;No cameras&039;

&039;You already destroyed mine&039;

He sneered at my ruse &039;I mean no cameras at all Not even the one in your cell phone I won&039;t interfere hat you write But there will be no pictures of what you see Furthermore, I&039;ll accompany you at all times If I decide that yoursafety is in jeopardy at any time, I&039;ll put you on the first transport back to base&039;

&039;You expect?&039;

&039;The fact that noaccess to the biggest story of your career,&039; he said I noticed for the first tilacial blue &039;Just the briefing I give you before we leave will probably net you a Pulitzer&039;

I laughed &039;Co a new kind of robot-&039;

&039;Those aren&039;t robots, Ms Flores Those are American citizens Or rather, they were Before they died&039;

It was eighty degrees out when I woke up the next , just before dawn It would creep over a hundred by lunchtis, and slipped down to thefor me He had an MP frisk ht along a couple bottles of water, a notebook, a pen, and a tube of sunblock I wasn&039;t about to blow this scoop by failing to ed, he started loading up a troop transport - an unarmored truck with an open flatbed, not even a canopy to protect the soldiers onboard from the sun

They didn&039;t need that kind of protection They didn&039;t feel the heat, I kne They didn&039;t feel anything

The yellow suits they wore had their own acrony the Army owns - IPWs, Insect-Proof Wrappers They were etting at the troops inside The ar away, but they could slow the process down a little The colonel estie member of his new battalion would last six raded by decomposition

The wrappers served another purpose, of course, which was to keepwhat our new soldiers looked like

The new soldiers were dead I still had a hard tiThey were dead bodies, most of them the bodies of soldiers who died in other conflicts The arotten their permission to use the bodies for any purpose required The fah e, or h for a down paye They had not been told what the bodies would be used for but had signed waivers saying they didn&039;t require further infor how bad the econoine they had a lot of trouble getting those waivers

The army picked up the bodies in unhdad Within a week they were up and ain, new soldiers for a new era of warfare

&039;The current nomenclature for them is PMCs As in PostMortem Combatants,&039; the colonel told me

&039;So they&039;reundead,&039; I said, staring into the back of the truck Fifty blank yellow faces looked back at me &039;Zombies&039;

The colonel winced at the word &039;They&039;re not going to eat your brains, if that&039;s what you mean They don&039;t eat They don&039;t think or feel any pain Their brains are completely shut down We control them by sequential electrical stiy class I&039;d seen that at work The teacher had a pair of severed frog&039;s legs attached to a dry-cell battery When she flipped a switch, the legs kicked This was the same principle Just a little more advanced

&039;We insert a microchip in the top of the spinal colu over to touch ers were icy cold &039;The chip is prograorith muscles in the correct sequence to lift one foot and put it in front of the other If ant them to pick up a crate, the chip has a subroutine for that This generation of chip has sorams, any of which can be chosen by the controller&039;

The controller - eant I&039;d seen at the FOB - had the right equipnals to those chips The controller could give a general order, and the PMCs would act as a group, or he could choose a certain PMC, identified by serial nuive it specific commands

&039;And this is cheaper than robots?&039; I asked

The colonel favored me with one of his chilly smiles &039;The chips are made in China for under ten dollars They can be inserted without surgical equip, wide-bore needle The Mylar for the wrappers costs us pennies for the square yard Ms Flores, it will cost us more to feed and house you on this trip than it did to activate my new troops&039;

He looked especially proud of that fact

&039;But they&039;re notintelligent on their own They can&039;t make decisions for themselves,&039; I said &039;They can&039;t be the equivalent of real troops&039;

&039;Let&039;s find out together, shall we?&039; He helped me up into the back of the truck In a fewdeep into disputed territory

We passed through scattered villages as the truck bumped and bounced over smoothed-out stretches of desert that could barely be called roads The Muzhiks came out of their houses to watch us pass by, shepherds and store owners in wool vests despite the heat, old woar in theto a very old, very quiet Sufi sect, though their genes had been passed down frohis Khan and his many wives They did not wave or smile They stared at the yellow men in the truck and hurried back to their business

Muzhikistan is a very old country and one of the poorest on Earth The people there have nothing to offer the world that it can&039;t get more cheaply or uely iet oil froh Muzhikistan Russia and the US had joined forces in the early 2010s to build a super-high-tech and strategically vital pipeline that ed to cut Muzhikistan in half

And of course some of the locals had taken exception to that