Machine Man - Max Barry [64]
“I could not be prouder to count myself as one of your supporters.” He smiled. I smiled back. “Now. Let’s talk supersoldiers.”
The Manager turned to the window and gazed into the distance. There was nothing out there but sky. I struggled to rearrange his last sentence so that it made sense. I thought: Did he mean super solder?
“The equipment carried by the average modern-day soldier weighs a hundred fifty pounds.” He turned and spread his palms. The light flooding in behind him made this vaguely messianic. “That’s a standard, what-do-you-call-them, grunt. The specialists lug half that again. The primary limitation of today’s soldier is simply that he can’t carry everything. War has become a load-bearing exercise. A logistics puzzle. And, sure, tell me it’s never been any different. Tell me that throughout history, battles have been won on the back of resource coordination. I’ll agree with you. To a point. That point is when the gap between what’s possible and what’s practical to carry becomes a canyon. And that’s what we have today. Imagine weight wasn’t an issue. We’d have soldiers who run at fifty miles per hour, leap twenty feet into the air, fire fifty-millimeter chain guns, shrug off enemy fire like it’s rain. We’d have Better Soldiers. And let me tell you, Dr. Neumann, as tickled as I am by the consumer-level products your people are producing, the Better Eyes and Better Skin and so forth, they’re nothing compared to what we can do with the military.” He held up a finger. “Let me correct that. What we can do with the militaries. I won’t bore you with business details, but there is a protocol for developing military products. The first step is you go to Defense and say, ‘Hello, just letting you know, we’re thinking about making a mobile combat exoskeleton.’ And they say thank you very much and here is a set of papers legally compelling every employee within a hundred-foot radius of our building to be cleared through military intelligence, a four-star general to be in the room whenever we utter the project’s name, and so on. Ten years later, when they allow us to build a crippled, simplified version of the product we originally designed, they give us another set of papers saying how many units we will produce, how much they’ll pay us for each one, and how many years we’ll serve in prison if we sell a single piece of related technology to another sovereign nation. And you know what? That sucks, Dr. Neumann. That is what keeps us small. So this time, I want to try it another way. Try it in-house. And I’m not saying we’ll sell these things to North Korea. I don’t think anyone wants North Korea with an army of, you know, unkillable Better Soldiers. But it’s not a bad thing for that possibility to be out there. It’s not a bad thing if we can go to DOD and say, ‘Whoops, mea culpa, turns out some of our people went ahead and developed human war machines, and they’re already on the ground in various poorly governed countries across the world.’ They’ll rant and scream and threaten, of course. But then we’ll do a deal. On our terms. Because we have the tech.”
I said, “I don’t want to be a supersoldier.”
Cassandra Cautery smiled. The Manager laughed. “Of course you don’t! Good God, Dr. Neumann, perish the thought. You’re a thinker.”
“You’re the brain,” said Cassandra Cautery.
“Exactly. Your role is hands-off.” His eyes flicked to my metal hand. “Excuse the expression. I mean there’s no need to put yourself through QA for every Better Part. We have people for that. Cassie must have talked you through this.”
“The thing with Charlie,” said Cassandra Cautery, “and I hope this doesn’t offend you, Charlie, but the thing is, he’s an artist. He has that mentality. I’ve been extremely, extremely cautious about bothering Charlie with the practical applications of his work, because for him it’s a personal project. Very personal. That’s what inspires him.”
The Manager was silent. “I’m not sure I understand. He’s an employee, isn’t he?”
“Of course, but—”
“Are