12:27 
This dream got to me because that soldier had an empty life. There was nothing but pain and fear and hurt and anger and bewilderment. There was nothing familiar to him except what was inside that little cocoon of a mobile base. The only love he had was for his commander, and he loved that man like he was his father, his god, could be persuaded by him to do anything. But it wasn't really that man he loved, it was his original commander, not this latest in a line of copies. That commander would probably never have let these things happen to his boys, but the copy did. The copy sent the grey men to bring him back, the copy had known it was a training exercise, the copy knew that the supports drained memories so that the soldiers had no knowledge of family, of history, of anything other than being a soldier. They kept their skills, the valuable bits (valuable to the Military), but no sense of who they were, only what they were.
I cried for that soldier this morning.
12:01
1: Shadowing is a completely arbitrary term I use to refer to those nights when I am someone else, but more that I am hitching a ride in someone else's life. I don't always have access to their memories or their background, but often I do, at least a little. They don't know I'm there. Sometimes the lesson is for me to learn, more often I'm there to help them out, to give them an extra bit of poke (although that doesn't mean I can't learn something while I'm at it). In this dream of the soldier, I helped him fight when he needed to fight, but was merely observing while he screamed at the reporter. I still feel as they feel - all the pain and fear he felt I felt as my own, this morning I feel as though I have been fighting, feel bruised and sore and stiff, even more so than usual.
11:56
Crying this morning. Pain is getting worse. It was a very rough night.
I dreamed I was "shadowing" [1] this guy in another place. He was a soldier, a very good one, but he was treated as an inferior being by all around him because his speciality was that he had no cybernetic enhancement of any sort whatsoever. Nearly everyone bar a select few, from schoolkids to weather presenters and the majority of military personnel, had cybernetic enhancement. Every single one had the small circles lacking skin on the inside of their forearms, a bluish tinted patterned metal. There were only ten soldiers like this one, all of whom worked for the same commander.
He was sent to do a job. It was a training exercise, but he didn't know that. He was kept in a state of near suspended animation. He didn't know what world he was in, or why everyone else around him was so much stronger, and every time they brought him round he was in a strange place, not knowing what was happening. The world outside was simply a place full of enemies for him. He was familiar no other world than the one inside their mobile base. He wasn't even to know that the man he thought of as his old commander was the last in a number of replacements. Expendable, he was.
In this training exercise the dropped him into an enemy base. It was based around a deep, cyclindrical structure, the size of an industrial chimney, which stretched some way under ground, with access hatches in the walls. Those access a hatches led out into complexes in the earth on the outside of the chimney.
The enemy base seemed deserted, at first, unused, the fear was incredible. He (I) made entrance through a hatch, began searching the corridors. There was so much tension, ever corner, every shadow seemed to hold an enemy. Then he found them, down i the lower levels. There had been a radiation leak, they were all wearing raditation suits, and there were red hazard lights providing all the illumination. Even more fear. To have to fight and know that you are being bombarded by radiation. He (I) was sobbing as he dodged shots from the weapons they carried, long guns like rifles but with a prominent bulb on the end of the barrel. They fired "solar flashes", bright like a single spark from a sparkler at bonfire night, increased in size to be as large as a man's head. He was dodging these things, ducking, rolling, hitting people, firing back with a similar weapon of his own, every second looking to find a way out that was rapid, that would take him out of the radiation, trying not to get hit and killed.
Finally he spotted a hole in the floor and dived down it, feeling cool air on his face. It could have dropped straight into the chimney, and the chimney could have been bottomless for all he knew, but he had this fear of radiation, knew he would be dying anyway if he didn't get out.
He landed on a small platform that gave way in a controlled bounce to take the impact of his fall. Immediately he leapt from this onto the ground, the floor of the chimney just in front of him. Behind him, some hatches opened and people started firing at him, but he returned the fire, all of them dropping. There was this wonder somewhere, far down, in is mind, about the fact he had not been hit, but he was too caught up in the mode of combat for it to register properly.
But then this blonde women, with the circles on the insides of her forearms, walked right up to him and stuck a microphone in his face.
"You're one of them, aren't you?" she said brightly. She had perfect teeth, cropped blonde hair, boyish, with bright blue eyes. She was tall and slender - taller than him. They all were, the entire group of them. They all wanted to touch, to see him. "Hey everyone, it's one of the old guys. What are you doing here today?"
She was a reporter. She was with a tour group who had somehoe got in for a trip round the abandoned facility. Suddenly all the people our man had shot started getting up. He couldn't understand it, didn't know what was going on and his mind snapped. He hit the woman with the butt of his weapon. She carried on talking as if she hadn't noticed, the only effect a pause of less than a second where her eyes glazed briefly as if some machine in her head was reinitialising. He hit her again, several times, nearly screaming iwth rage and fear. He hit some of the others, hit one of the guys in radiation suits.
"How does it feel to be smaller and weaker than everyone else?" she asked him.
He went mad. he went absolutely stark raving bonkers. He grabbed her, taking her by suprise, ran with her and slammed her against the wall. She blinked, that was all. He had her round the throat and she was just letting him do it, more confused, more "does not compute" than anything else.
"Wait! You wait!" he was screaming at her. "You fucking goddamn machine! You wait! One day! One day! You think we don't have a fucking purpose? We do the fucking jobs you can't do because of all the fucking machinery, because of interference! You bitch! You goddamn fucking bitch! All of you! One day!"
There was all this spittle flying, he was shaking and crying. So much anger and pain and fear and also hurt pride, so many feelings of impotence because the rest of the world had been changed to be stronger than him, had changed so much and not taken him with it in any way that meant he could be part of it.
Then a black craft settled down and a couple of big burly men got out. They grabbed him, he was still fighting, thought that they were the enemy too. They were so much bigger than him, both dressed in black, had very dark skin, but dark grey, not black, had rolls of flesh but not fat. They said nothing, but held him in a choke hold, impervious to his struggles, lifting him off the ground, until he fell unconscious.
He awoke later with a sore head, sitting on a chair inside the mobile base. It was quite dim in there, dim but familiar. He was in a lot of pain. He (I) could feel his head resting back against springy supports. The supports were in a horizontal v shape, to cradle the back of his head, had a certain amount of movement in them so that the weight of his head leaning on them would push them into the correct position. In those supports was machinery that generated impulses wich fed into the the back of his head and sent him into this near suspended state. He knew all that. Everything in the base was familiar to him, including the other men, still dressed in full kit, who sat in their respoective chairs, apparently asleep. Monitors next to their heads showed their status, generated images of their heads revolving, colours dancing within the images showing activity. On each monitor there was one head with flesh and one head that was just a skull, with different patterns of colour. He could not read the text, not even the alphabet, of the information that scrolled past next to the heads, but he had some vague sense of what it was telling the people who used it.
He didn't want to sit down, to do as he was told, he hurt and he was tired and angry and bewildered, but his commander, the one familiar face whom he trusted implicitly, talked gently but firmly to him until he was persuaded. But just as he was settling down, adjusting himself so that his head leaned back on the supports and his shoulders were firmly held by the contours of the chair, he happened to look outside through a tiny one-way window and see an old woman being attacked in the street by three youths, who had brought her to the ground. The window was in a door, and even though he was not supposed to use that door, he leapt up, out through the door, and kicked the shit out of the three youths.
"You see?!" he screamed, to no one in particular, sobbing. "We're not obsolete."
They came outside and got him and put him to sleep. Til next time.
Tuesday, September 19, 2000
